by Jack Whyte
"Shelagh," I could hear the tension in my own voice. "I have lost track of time. Forgive me, but I promised Ambrose I would spend the afternoon with him, talking to people on a matter of great urgency, and it is long past noon. The time has flown. Will you permit me to. . . leave now?" The hesitation had been very slight, but I had almost used the word "escape." I wondered fleetingly if she had noticed, but her response showed she had not. In a moment she was on her feet, taking my hand in a tight, two-handed grasp.
"Of course, Caius," she said. "Go now, but before you do, tell me this. Do you believe, completely without reservation, that I will guard your trust in this?"
I raised her hands to my lips and kissed her fingers, feeling the fiery contact searing into my memory and being branded there with the scent of her skin. "Completely, and without reservation. Now pardon me, I must go." I spun on my heel and walked from the room, humiliatingly aware of my own arousal and cursing myself for my perfidy.
Recalling that as I lay in my cot that first night in my solitary hunting camp, I felt myself stirring again and turned my thoughts to another topic: the matter that had taken me to meet with Ambrose that same afternoon.
I had originally accepted Ambrose's opinion on the schism within our forces without argument, simply because I had been convinced with that curious, half-blind arrogance that seems to lie within all of us, that the opinion he expressed was merely that—a personal perspective on a minor problem. I had not questioned his belief in the troublesome division he reported, nor did I doubt the existence of the dichotomy itself. The unfortunate corollary was that I had equally little doubt that the phenomenon must be no more than a minor, distracting irritant—a barrack-room philosopher's complaint, born of some misunderstanding, then broadcast and blown out of all proportion. I had, at root, no doubt of my own power to correct it merely by directing my attentions towards healing the rift. In consequence, I began my remedial efforts on the afternoon following our discussion, blithely confident that the problem, once defined and isolated, and once I had shown that I was concerned about it, would dry up and disappear in a spontaneous explosion of Colony-wide goodwill and military solidarity.
By the end of the second day, however, it had become obvious, even through an intransigence as vast as mine was then, that matters were far from well within Camulod's once close-knit little army. Dismayed by what I had already discovered, I had taken leave of Council that morning to absent myself from the regularly scheduled session, for even by then it had become undeniable that Ambrose was right, and that the rivalries between the men who formed our two main forces were much less than amicable. Underlying, deep hostilities had surfaced rapidly in the recent past and now I could see they were but thinly masked, and that impending violence between our cavalry and infantry lay buried by no more than a single, shallow layer of ill- borne discipline.
The recognition of another pair of competing factions destroyed my complacency. Aware that the consternation caused by the affair of the Farmers and the Artisans had not yet had time to fade from the minds of the Colonists at large, I was appalled to find myself facing a similar, frighteningly comparable situation, this time within my own command. And in this instance there appeared to be no obvious progenitors—no identifiable group who were recognizably at fault. My initial, instinctive reactions to what I found beneath my nose were fear and dismay, quickly followed by a violent urge to roar and rend—to vent my anger and outrage on my disgruntled troops—which, of course, I could not do without the risk of provoking them to outright rebellion. The officer cadre, however, was another matter, and for a short time I came close to yielding to the temptation to create havoc within those ranks. I gave thanks to God many times thereafter for the presence of my brother and his placid, unruffled perception and wisdom. He cajoled me and calmed me, diverted my anger, and made me see and finally accept that my own complicity, through simple ignorance, was as great as any other's. I slept poorly that night, nevertheless, and then for no more than an hour or so.
On the morning of the third day, we held the meeting we had planned, assembling all the officers in garrison at the time—Staff, Field and Warrant ranks, Cavalry and Infantry. Dedalus and his six comrades from our Eirish travels were in attendance, their expedition to Glevum summarily postponed for the time being pending the outcome of this plenary officers' conference, the first formal Tribunal ever held in Camulod for the resolution of a purely military domestic emergency. It was convened, for the sake of privacy and security, in the old, now-empty but still well-maintained Villa Britannicus on the plain beneath the hill of Camulod. No guards were assigned to duty there that day, and no servants permitted within the Villa confines. We fed ourselves between sessions from cooking fires lit outside the gates. The word had been passed among the attendees the previous day and everyone arrived at the Villa at the pre-ordained time, within half an hour after the break of dawn. The Colonists must have speculated wildly at the sight of the entire complement of the garrison's officers blearily making their way, singly and in small groups, down the road from the main gates in the pre-dawn darkness, but their speculation would go unresolved for many days, since everyone who attended that extraordinary session was sworn to secrecy.
The order of the proceedings was straightforward, and the first directive was that the two disciplines, horse and foot, should mingle in equality, no two of either discipline sitting together. There were almost two hundred officers present, and Ambrose and I shared the office of Convenor. I began by outlining the situation succinctly and forcefully, apportioning no blame and voicing no criticism. I defined the Schism, as I had come to think of it, as a military fact requiring an immediate solution, and then threw the topic open for debate.
By the end of the day, as the sun was going down, we had made progress, but the process had been noisy and at times almost unruly. Voices had been raised in angry disagreement at various times, and acrimonious insults had flown freely, but I believed that no new enmities had been forged and no lasting ill will fomented. A consensus had been reached: the problem that faced us was dangerous, inimical to the well-being of the Colony. It behoved all of us, therefore, to act together, according to the dictates of a carefully defined agenda, to pour soothing balm on the hurts, real and imaginary, suffered by each side in this dispute at the hands of the other. The primary difficulty, of course, would lie in the identification and definition of a solution, and in the development of a means of putting it into effect.
As I might have expected, it was Dedalus who came up with the most practical observation, after having sat for some time, bent forward, in a huddled conversation with Philip, Quintus and Rufio, all of whom were grouped close by him, interspersed among infantry officers.
"Commander!" He held up his hand, demanding my attention, and when I recognized him he rose slowly, looking around at his assembled colleagues while addressing me. "I've been talking with some of the people around us, from both sides—" He broke off, apparently realizing too late what he had said, and then grinned his rogue's grin. "Your pardon . . . from both viewpoints might be a better way of phrasing that." Everyone laughed and I immediately felt more sanguine about the outcome of this affair.
"Aye. It might. Captain Dedalus," I answered him, allowing my face to crease into a slow smile and provoking more, but restrained laughter. "But guard your mouth from now on. No more seditious talk. We are one force, you know."
"I know that well enough, Commander. But so do you and Commander Ambrose." He lapsed into silence. I blinked at him.
"Forgive me, Dedalus, but I fail to see your point."
"You two are my point, Commander, with respect." He nodded from one to the other of us. "Peas in a pod," he grunted. "Flowers on a bush. Identical. Both of Camulod. Both Commanders. To look at you, you're indistinguishable one from the other, and yet one of you's an infantryman and the other's a horseman. Why don't you assemble all the troops—as you've assembled us—and let them see that? I mean, they know it, but they haven't seen
it, if you know what I mean." He sat down again, looking at his hands and allowing his words to hang there over the assembly.
I sat there for several moments, going over the implications of what he had said. The same comment had been made, although in different words and in another context, by Ambrose several nights earlier when he had suggested a formal parade. The silence in the room, which had been sustained, was suddenly broken from somewhere at the rear of the large room, where someone began to applaud, slowly, and the sound spread quickly until I had to stand up and spread my arms for silence.
Dedalus's recommendation was adopted immediately and unanimously. Such a gathering would take place, but it would have to be, by definition, extraordinary. For the space of at least two days, it was agreed, we must assume the risk of leaving our outlying lands unguarded. We had no alternative, since it would be an admission of defeat before we began were we to preclude anyone, of any rank or for any cause, from attending on this occasion. That decision made, we began to discuss the best timing for such an unprecedented convocation, and decided that it would be held on the eleventh and twelfth days after our meeting, coinciding with the recently adopted monthly changing of the guard patrols. This time, and this one time only, the old guard would come in, but the new guard would remain at home for two extra days before departing. Our most distant frontiers would be unguarded for the better part of three full days—one day for the departing guard to return to Camulod, one more for the convocation, and a third, or some portion of the third, for the new guard to return. That vulnerable time would be greatly reduced in the case of those outposts closest to Camulod, where the guards would remain in place longer before leaving and could return more quickly. Before that happened, however, and as close to the appointed time as possible, we would conduct an intensive, high-speed reconnaissance of the lands beyond our lands' perimeter, to assure ourselves as far as we were able, that no impending attack was building prior to our deliberate suspension of vigilance.
Thereafter, slightly reassured of our eventual success but greatly apprehensive of our initial method of achieving it, I spent two more days and much of both nights fretting over what we would say to the troops, until Ambrose and several of my friends virtually threw me out of Camulod with my bow, bidding me gather viands for the festivities, which would be held the day following my return.
In the grey dawn of the last day of my hunt, I experienced a phenomenon that I have never known repeated. I spent a full hour in a hunter's paradise, in a place I had discovered the day before, where a large number of deer trails, many showing the hoofprints of large animals, converged amid low, sparse bushes at the base of a jumbled pile of whitish rock. I had identified the spot as being a natural salt lick and had made my camp close by, wakening early to creep stealthily into concealment in full darkness, and confirming that the direction of the breeze had not changed overnight before placing myself well downwind of the lick, at the base of the large tree I had marked out with a dagger the day before. From here, I had estimated, I would have an unobstructed shot at whatever creatures passed the convergence of the trails that morning.
As the sky began to pale, however, the breeze strengthened to a brisk wind and then grew even stronger, blasting in hard, violent gusts, whipping the bushes wildly, rattling the bare branches of the winter trees and frequently even snatching the air from my lips as I sought to breathe. I cursed my ill fortune but remained in place, huddled against my tree bole, hoping that the sudden change would abate with the same speed that had brought it, and that no rain would follow it. Daylight grew almost imperceptibly, a long and weary struggle with the dominance of darkness, but at length I found I was able to distinguish the dense, roiling masses of clouds in the leaden sky, and all the time the wind kept rising until it was a howling gale.
I lost all judgment of the length of time I had spent huddled there, and eventually rose to my knees to leave, abandoning my hunt, only to find myself looking into the largest herd of deer I had ever seen in these parts. There must have been fifty animals in my immediate view, most of them grazing, heads down in the low brush, apparently unconcerned by the violent wind. On a low knoll less than forty paces ahead of me and to my left, the patriarch stood poised, head up, his magnificent spread of antlers almost flat along his back, his nose pointed directly into the storm. Even from where I crouched I could see his eyes were closed, and I reached for an arrow. Before I moved again, however, I looked once more at the herd and counted twelve strapping young males, all less than two years old, and thirty-nine females. I had no doubt that there were others, hidden from me by the woods and rocks.
Regretfully, I returned my attention to the herd leader, the largest animal there. I knew that the moment I killed him the others would vanish, despite their swarming numbers, swallowed up by the forest and the greyness of the day. I took aim carefully, knowing that the fury of the wind would have no effect on such a short-range flight, and then I stepped into my shot and fired, sending my arrow straight into the spot I had selected. The stag went down immediately, his brain transfixed by the missile that had entered behind his ear. I stood frozen, awaiting the bounding panic that would greet his fall, but nothing happened. The herd continued grazing, the death of their leader unnoticed, and I realized that the fury of the wind and the chaos it created had dulled their senses somehow, robbing them of their legendary acuity. Scarcely daring to breathe, and expecting to be discovered at any moment, I moved cautiously around and selected another target, this one directly on my right, close by the edge of the forest proper and even closer to me than the first had been. Directly ahead of me, between the two of us, a shoulder- high bush lashed from side to side. I took note of it, allowed for its movement, and thereafter ignored it. Again I sighted and fired, and again the animal fell to its knees, out of my sight and into death without disturbing any of its neighbours.
Aware now of a visceral excitement, I cast my eyes around in search of another available target and saw a young doe close by, almost completely hidden from me by another flailing bush. She was farther away than the others had been, however, and I could not obtain a clear view for a killing shot, so I set out with the utmost care to close the distance between us, crouching low and fully cognisant of the sea of movement all around that cloaked me. I drew as near as I dared go, for fear of being seen by the doe I was stalking or by another animal, and risked what I knew to be a hazardous shot. I loosed, and watched a vicious gust of wind snatch at the speeding shaft and send it high, so that it almost grazed the feeding creature's back. And once more, miraculously, the animal paid no heed. Emboldened now, I sighted and shot again, and this time my aim was true and she went down.
In the half hour that followed, buffeted and shaken by the wind until my clothes seemed useless and I was chilled to the bone, I wrought havoc among that herd, nocking my arrows with cold, nerveless fingers, keeping myself downwind at all times, so that the buffeting of the gale hit me directly in the face, and moving laterally in a narrow arc, hither and yon, remorselessly killing the beasts on the outside of the dwindling herd. A score of them fell to my deadly attack before the twenty-first, a massive-muscled young stag, leapt about and fled, bugling a note of panic. Watching him go, I wondered what had frightened him, for I knew by that time that it would not have been my presence. Perhaps, I thought, he had caught the scent of fresh- spilled blood, borne on an errant eddy of gusting wind. Whatever the cause of his fright, however, they were gone.
Slowly then, I walked around the scene of my slaughter, counting my kill. Twenty fresh deer, of a kind unknown to me, far bigger than the common red deer to which I was accustomed in these parts. Twenty large deer! I had not the slightest hope of being able to clean and dress them alone, but I had to do something with them.
Four hours later, shaking with exhaustion, I gutted the last of them and dragged it, with the help of my horse, to lie beside its fellows. After that I returned to my campsite and finally broke my fast before breaking camp and heading towards the
spot where I had left my three-carcass kill the previous day, safely cleaned and, unlike the other twenty, hung high from the branches of an oak. The wind had died down a little, but the day was still unfit for man or beast. I arrived at the spot before any of the collectors had arrived, so I found a depression out of the wind beneath a fallen log, wrapped myself in my cloak and sat down to rest. The twenty deer might be discovered by a predator, but that was something over which I now had no control, and so I dismissed them from my mind for the present, concentrating, with a sense of well-being, on other, more pleasant things.
I must have fallen asleep, because the voices startled me into a panic- stricken crouch, my dagger in my hand and my knees protesting at the sudden movement. There were four men in the party, and I knew all of them. Even better, I had the pleasure of surprising them as much as they had me, for they had not seen me lying asleep beneath my log. Now I winged an arrow into a tree trunk beside them and laughed as they scattered, cursing and clawing for weapons. I stepped forward immediately and they shuffled together uneasily, crestfallen at the apparent magic with which I had "crept up on them" across an open glade. I said nothing to disillusion them, but set them quickly to lowering the three carcasses from the oak tree, and then I led them to the clearing where I had left my twenty new prizes. These had remained untouched, Fortune continuing to favour me throughout the day.