by Jack Whyte
"Aye," I said, feeling wondrously relieved. "And willingly, to all of them."
"And have you none to add? None of your own?"
I smiled easily now. "Aye, that I have, now you mention it. But we drink first to yours."
We touched the rims of our cups and sipped the fiery beverage they held, and I luxuriated in the honeyed glide of pleasure on my tongue.
She licked her lips and smacked them together. "Not as good as my own," she said. "But not trivial, either." She shifted in her seat and looked at me again. "Your turn; your list."
I took my time, enumerating and then refining the list of gratitudes I felt. Shelagh waited patiently.
"We will drink this time to us, once more, without constraint, and without regret: to this remarkable freedom from guilt you have granted me, and to the . . . obligation you have outlined in that granting. We drink to friendship, yours and mine, unorthodox as some might choose to see it, and that which we share with others. We drink also to Destiny and Duty, two fearsome taskmasters, as you have said, and to tomorrow . . . all tomorrows, in the hope and trust that they will bring fulfillment and contentment." I paused, and tipped the libation on the floor. "Will that suffice, think you?"
"For the gods, or for your list? I think both will be well." She raised her cup to mine again and we drank, then sat for a time in silence, gazing into the flames until I roused myself.
"What time of day is it, I wonder?"
"Around mid-morning." She spoke without looking at me. "Perhaps later, near the three-quarter point, but short of noon. Should you be elsewhere?"
"No, not until noon, but by then I must be dressed in formal parade gear. I still have time." I savoured the last mouthful of my mead.
"My sons—our sons, mine and Donuil's—will be companions to your infant King, you know. Had you thought of that?"
"No, I had not." I shook my head, ruefully. "But you may have daughters."
"Shame, Caius Merlyn! Do you doubt me now? I will have sons. I told you long ago when first we met; two of them, Gwin and Ghilleadh. And they will be companions to your ward, young Arthur. . . Cousins, too."
I shook my head, enjoying this sudden, novel feeling of relief from tension between myself and this delightful woman. "Come, Shelagh, you're not even yet with child."
She laughed. "Not even bedded, as a proper wife."
"No, but think what that means. Arthur is six months old and more, already. By the time your first son is born, even if Donuil were to come tonight and quicken you at once, there would be fifteen months between the two youngsters, and that means thirty months between your youngest and young Arthur. That is a vast gulf during childhood."
"Aye, but childhood is brief. Three years is nothing at all between young men. Look at yourself and Donuil; what is there, nine years between you? Besides, when two or three children grow up close together, age has little influence. Only when an elder child has other friends of his own age does difference emerge."
"But that will be the case, Shelagh! It seems there are children being born everywhere in Camulod today. Only last night, at dead of midnight, I met Lucanus on his way to a birthing. The child was born safely, to the young wife of one of our councilors. It was a boy. They'll call him Luke, Ludmilla told me earlier. So there's one more companion for the King."
"No, there will only be the three, Arthur and Gwin and Ghilleadh. Believe me." Her voice had altered somehow, and I felt a chill run over me, raising the small hairs on my neck and shoulders, but then she was speaking again in her normal tones, quite unaware, it seemed to me, of having said anything strange. "How long had you been standing there, behind me, before you spoke this morning?"
I looked at her then, remembering and smiling. "Not long. Why?"
"I don't know. I was wondering, but idly, if there is more to this 'attraction' than I had thought. It had been my intent to seek you out today, somehow, even though I was well aware of the demands upon your time."
"Why? Why seek me out? To what end?"
"To provoke this talk and deal with the things that had been troubling me. I dreamed of you last night."
My guts contracted as dismay expanded in my breast. "Oh . . . Was it. . ."
"No, not one of those." Her smile was fleeting but her headshake was emphatic. "No prophesy this time; mere fancies, vivid and very real, but disjointed and confusing, most of them erotic. I dreamed I lay with Donuil, and could feel him within me, but sometimes it was you—never for long; never sustained—but there, from time to time. I woke up at one point, in some distress, over what I can't recall, but I decided to do something, to speak to you of this. I wondered, lying there awake in the middle of the night, what effect your dreams might be having on you. If this fragmented chaos of sleeping images could distress me, safely asleep in all good conscience, what might yours be doing to your peace of mind, with all your strictures and your disciplines and loyalties? I've watched you, Cay, and I have seen your agonies of guilt, though the gods know no such guilt was ever less deserved." She shrugged. "And you came here, unexpected. Or were you unexpected? Had I guessed, though unaware of it, that you would come here? I don't know."
Before I could answer her, we heard the sound of studded boots approaching in the passageway outside, and then someone knocked on the door.
"Commander Merlyn?"
"Yes, Marcus, I'm here."
"You asked me to remind you when the time had come to dress, Commander. I have your parade uniform prepared."
"Thank you, Marcus. I'll come directly."
The footsteps receded again and I stood up and moved close to where Shelagh sat, her eyes once more upon the flickering flames in the big brazier. "Shelagh," I said, speaking to the top of her head, "I am leaving here a very different man from the one I was when I first walked in. I know not what this . . . thing, this feeling, this sense of inner freedom is, or whence it sprang, but I am full of it and I know it is your gift. For that. . . for all of it. . . for yesterday, today and all the tomorrows to which we drank together, I am too grateful ever to be able to find words to define my gratitude. But you will know it. You'll see it every time you see my face or hear my name. That is my promise."
She rose to her feet smoothly and with great speed, turning to face me in mid-motion and looking me directly in the eye. The belt of knives seemed natural across her front.
"I know that, Caius Merlyn, and it gladdens me. You have been too sad, too guilt-stricken in past days, but that's behind us." She grinned at me, her huge, wide eyes flashing with wicked humour. "Lust if you must, but keep your hands about yourself, my friend. Thus, we may both enjoy, without false guilt. Now go, before someone finds us and sets all our good work to naught with idle talk."
I left her there by the fire and strode out into the day with a lightened heart and the strength of twelve tall men.
I opted to exercise the privilege of rank again, for the second time that day, and avoided the festive midday meal, although there was no way to avoid the sound of it. I chose to spend that time alone, and had Marcus, my temporary adjutant—an assigned replacement for the absent Donuil—make alternative arrangements on my behalf. Then, nibbling at a platter of food he brought me in my quarters, and preparing myself mentally for the formal activities that lay ahead, I spent a half hour going over all the arrangements in my head for perhaps the hundredth time. Eventually, when I was sure of having done all that I should have done there in the fortress, I slipped quietly out through the postern gate and found my horse, saddled and ready, where I had told my man to leave it, prior to joining the general festivities. Unseen by anyone, I allowed my horse to pick his way down from the heights, and then I spurred him, galloping all the way round the hill of Camulod to the camp built at the bottom of the hill before, and again after, Lot's treacherous attack years earlier.
I have always found it stranger than merely strange that I should have difficulty recalling the events of that afternoon. "Strange" is a foolish and feeble word to use in describing t
he blankness of my mind regarding all that passed. I think of words like "ominous" instead, but even that would be misleading, for no ill came out of that day's gathering. The plain truth is, it led to great success on every front, in every way. The events and decisions and the sheer enthusiasm engendered in that single afternoon marked, clearly and undeniably, the beginning of Camulod's most truly potent years, a period that was to span three decades. At the end of the clay itself, I was aware of all that had transpired—I must have been, for I was there, in charge, and in full health. But the time that came immediately thereafter absorbed me totally in other things, demanding all my skills and all my efforts, so that when I came to look back, eventually, on what had seemed at the time to be a momentous and portentous day, my mind was blank. The urgencies that had led up to it had been revealed by then, with the passing of time, as lacking stature, and had been replaced by greater urgencies and imperatives.
Dedalus distinguished himself that afternoon; no one had any doubt of that. His friends agreed his time had long been wasted as a soldier, and that he should have been upon a stage somewhere in Empire's headlands, stealing the hearts of emperors and languid women. There is no doubt he achieved what he set out to achieve: to win the hearts of all the Camulodian warriors and bind them into unity and amity again. He used me and Ambrose as his template, dwelling upon our startling similarities and on our different disciplines. He emphasized the difference of our births and boyhoods, one bred and raised right here in Camulod, the other in a distant part of Britain, yet both sprung, irrefutably, from Camulodian stock. Now we were joined as one, Commanders of Camulod and individually indistinguishable one from the other and yet. . . and yet. . . one fought with cavalry, the other infantry. Together, using all our combined skills, he told them all, we could conquer the world! And would they quibble over which of us they followed?
It was heady stuff, presented with the flair and brilliance of a born actor who could charm tears from statuary. But, it appears, the true mark of his triumph was that he had them all convinced, swearing eternal comradeship, even before he introduced the new training schedule Ambrose had devised, to teach each discipline the tactics of the other and make it possible for those gifted one way or the other to transfer between commands. That was the binding ring that sealed the staves into a barrel. From the moment the new plans were announced, the schism had ended.
I do remember, with great clarity, that at one point shortly before the parade was dismissed, I saw a single snowflake drifting down to cling to the tail of Rufio's horsehair crest. I looked up to search for more, but saw nothing. The snow that had fallen before dawn had almost vanished beneath the trampling of so many feet, but the cold persisted. I continued to scan the faces ranked before me, filling every available space in the camp's parade ground. Some of them, many of them now, I knew by sight, and many more by name as well. But some were yet strangers to me, although they all knew me. Another flake came down, and then a third, large, fat and as light as thistledown. And then, as Ambrose gave the order to dismiss, the snow began to fall in earnest, hushing everything, it seemed, and obscuring the milling mass of men heading for shelter.
Ambrose was looking at me, smiling, his outstretched hand held upwards to the caressing snowflakes, which landed on his palm and disappeared. "Well, Brother, what think you? An omen?"
I attempted to catch some of the falling flakes in my right hand. "Perhaps," I said. "We will know tomorrow, if it snows all night. But I feel sorry for the outgoing troops. They'll not be too happy, slogging their way through this to the cold outposts. When do they leave?"
He threw his arm across my shoulders. "Within the hour. They'll reach the first line camps by dark and stay there overnight. In the morning, those who have to go to the outlying posts will make their way there, regardless of the weather, but the quartermasters have already issued winter gear. They won't be cold . . . or not too cold."
Because of the extraordinary numbers gathered for the parade, the Council Chamber had been allotted to the garrison officers for the remainder of that day and night, and I joined Ambrose and the others there for a celebration the like of which had never been known within the fortress. By the time I left to seek my cot, the entire courtyard was covered by a thick carpet of snow so that, on an impulse, I walked as far as the main gates and stepped out onto the bare hillside at the top of the hill road. The silence was absolute, and the falling snow seemed like a living thing. I went back in, bidding the guard a good night, and went to sleep. Ambrose, it seemed, might see his wish come true if the snow persisted for another day. It was still cold, and I threw my cloak on top of my blanket before I climbed into bed.
XXIII
It snowed for seven days without respite, with intermittent, ferocious windstorms blowing and piling the drifting snow to incredible heights, death-filled depths and fantastical shapes. The eighth day dawned upon a motionless, utterly silent, white-shrouded emptiness beneath a solid mass of heavy, uniformly grey cloud. The snow had stopped and people began to emerge into daylight again, peering around them in stupefaction at the manner in which their universe had been altered. Before noon, the snow began to fall again, in a different form this time, the flakes much smaller now, and dense, like tiny chips of ice. In mid-afternoon the temperature plummeted within an hour, and remained at its lowest for nine more days and nights, immersing us in a frigid chaos of misery the like of which no one could remember. Exposed fingers, noses, ears and chins would freeze within moments, even out of the bitter wind. This cold was such that bare skin would adhere to metal, if one were foolish enough to permit such contact, and in the first few days many of us were.
No one had ever known such brutal cold, and soon it became lethal. Entire families living beyond the fortress wall, thinking the worst was over when the first snowfall ended, chose to remain in their homes rather than run the risk of attempting to make their way to safety in the fort, and froze to death when their supplies of fuel ran out during the days and nights that followed; many others, particularly the aged and infirm, starved to death, for neither fuel nor food could be obtained while the storm was raging, and both young and old, who went out into the storm to search for one or the other, lost their way in a trackless wilderness where only days before there had been pathways and clear landmarks to guide their steps. And as the cold killed people, so too it killed our stock; cattle and goats, swine and sheep and horses. Only those animals safely lodged and warm under roofs survived in any numbers. Most of our cavalry mounts remained safe. Of the remaining beasts, penned or abandoned under the skies without food, one in every three perished, a grim reminder of my own hubris in claiming, only months earlier, that we were rich enough, in the event of a poor harvest, to survive the winter months on meat alone.
Not until the first, most frightful phase had passed and life began to regain a form of normalcy did we in Camulod itself learn of the horrors that had stricken others less fortunate and more isolated than were we. We should have known, should have anticipated chaos. That was an opinion voiced by many who, armed with hindsight, could foretell that nothing so awful would ever occur again, were the matter left to them . . .
When first it broke upon us, that cataclysmic winter was a nightmare alien to everyone's experience. The oldest living in our lands, people like my own great-aunt and the Legates Flavius and Titus, each of whom had outlived seventy winters, had never known such weather, nor could they recall anyone from their early lives ever having spoken of such cold and ferocity. How, then, could any of the Council have been prepared for such a catastrophe, or anticipated the broad swathe of death those bleak November days would usher in?
December was nine days old by the time the vicious, killing cold abated the first time, although the snow had ceased to fall some days before. In Camulod, and in the camp beneath, we had been fortunate beyond our awareness, in that the mountainous supplies of firewood assembled for the convocation day had not all been consumed as intended because of the onset of the storm. By the
latter days, however, all of it had gone, and even valuable, seasoned wood from the carpenters' stores had been exhausted. Large foraging parties were sent out to gather fuel as soon as the snow stopped, and they had painful, heavy, back-breaking work to find it and bring it back. Wheeled vehicles were useless, so our carpenters removed the wheels and fashioned skids and bound them to the axles of the wagons. Even so, the snow was too deep for the horses to plough through, and so our soldiers had to clear a path ahead of each team. Not since the days of the Emperor Claudius, more than four hundred years before, had soldiers worked so hard at building roads in Britain.
As they made their way through the wilderness, the forage parties began to find the dead. When the first news of such a discovery came back to Camulod, it was greeted with appalled anguish. Within the week, however, such grisly findings were all but commonplace and we had become inured to the new way of things. Many had died: the old, the weak and the unfortunate. Many more, however, had survived frightful deprivation under frequently incredible conditions. One family of seven had fed themselves for seven days on the body of an injured wolf that had died outside their hut. The father had fallen over it, hidden beneath the snow, as he ran out into the storm, in the vain, desperate hope of finding assistance for his starving children. They had boiled it, piece by piece, with melted snow to make a stew, and only the head was left when the soldiers came to rescue them.