by Jack Whyte
"Aye. Renegades all, human filth. They slaughtered as many of our people, probably more of them, than they did yours. How many did you lose?"
"Close to fifty."
"We count ours in hundreds, thanks to your contribution to our wars."
That confused me, as he saw by my immediate frown. "What do you mean, my contribution? Your wars are no concern of mine."
He shook his head slightly. "Not yours personally, Camulod's."
I still had no idea of what he meant. "That is nonsense," I said. "What possible contribution might Camulod have made to your wars? I command in Camulod, with my brother Ambrose, and I would know of any such interference. This force here is the first from Camulod ever to set foot in Pendragon country."
"The first armed force, aye. I was thinking of force of another kind." He paused, his head tilted to one side, and suddenly I remembered him from that gesture. We had been friends, one summer long ago, when we were both but boys, years short of man's estate. I remembered him swimming like a fish and springing up from the water onto a bank, shaking the water from his long hair and tilting his head that way to look at me.
"I remember you now," I said.
"Aye, as I said, it has been many years, but I did not know you had a brother."
"A half-brother, and I did not know, either, until a short time ago. For almost thirty years we lived apart, in ignorance each of the other's existence. Now we are close. But I still don't know what you are talking about. What kind of force can there be that is not armed?"
"Personality, Merlyn. Character. The force of one strong man who can control and dominate one weaker than himself."
I blew the breath from my mouth sharply, turning away impatiently, my mind racing over his words and seeking his meaning. Above me on the hillside, the serried ranks of Pendragon bowmen stood looking down, alert and menacing. I glanced towards my own men, then swung back to face Dergyll.
"Look here, Dergyll, are we to fight? I seek no quarrel with you, but I believe you have our horses. I do not believe you stole them, or that you were responsible for any of the deaths in Camulod. But they were back there, by the grove of oaks, no later than a day ago, and if indeed you hanged the renegades back there, then you must have taken the horses."
He chose not to answer me directly, his tone indicating nevertheless that fighting was not in the forefront of his thoughts at that moment. "Does the name Carthac mean anything to you?"
I frowned. "Carthac? It is familiar, but I don't know how. Didn't Uther have a cousin named Carthac? A strange boy, it seems to me, though it has been years since I thought of him. He was misshapen, was he not?"
Dergyll nodded. "Aye, he was, and is. Misshapen is a good word for him."
I was perplexed. "Why would you ask me about him, Carthac? Does he rule in Uther's place now?"
The answer to that was an abrupt bark of savage laughter. "Hah! Do you remember Mod?"
"Mod?" The non sequitur confused me yet again, but a face jumped into my mind immediately. "Yes, I knew a lad called Mod, apprenticed to my friend Daffyd, the Druid. Is that the Mod you mean?"
"Aye, and what of Ironhair?"
"Ironhair!" The name stunned me. "You mean Peter Ironhair? The smith?"
"Smith . . . Aye, I've heard it said he is a smith. But Peter Ironhair is what this fellow calls himself. He is from Camulod, no?"
"No! Or yes, he lived there for a time, until he deemed it wiser to move on. He was a newcomer, though, not one of our own. He made himself a power there, for a short time, while I lay ill. When I had recovered, he and I... disagreed . . . over some matters of policy and government. He tried to have me killed, but failed, then disappeared before he could be taken. How do you know Ironhair?"
"Because he fled from you to us. But he told us no tale of flight, or of murder attempted. He told us he was your friend, sent by you as a gesture of friendship, to work among us after the death of Uther, the king, your cousin."
"What? But—"
"Wait you." Now Dergyll raised his other arm, his right, and one of the men sitting on the knoll behind him produced a long horn and wound a low, ululating note from it. For long moments nothing happened, and then two things occurred at once. The bowmen positioned on the flank of the hillside broke into new movement, breaking ranks and beginning to move laterally, back in the direction of the hill at the chief's back, to where they would no longer constitute a threat to my own men. At the same time, a new surge of movement broke out from behind the low hill ahead of me, and our forty missing horses were brought forward, herded by five or six men mounted on the smaller mountain ponies of the Celts.
"We have a camp, a mile farther down the valley. And we have hunters out. Bring your men, and join us. Mod is there, in our camp. He has a tale for you."
"I will, but wait you now. You believe this Ironhair to be a friend of mine?"
He smiled, and the grimness of his features disappeared. "I did, but your own face gave the lie to it. Now I know different. That's why I called away my men. Come you ahead when you have spoken with your people. I'll see you in the camp. There is a stream, and ample water and grazing for your beasts."
He turned and ran lithely back to where he had left his horse, leaping fluidly up onto its back without hesitation, so that I remembered again what a wondrous rider he had been even as a boy. I walked back to my own horse, mulling over the entire confrontation.
Dedalus sat and watched me, making no move to speak until I was safely anchored in my saddle. When he did speak, it was in his usual sardonic manner.
"How are your bowels?"
"Remarkable, why do you ask?"
"I simply wondered if they spasmed as much as mine when those creatures up there threw off their coverings. Come now, admit they did."
I smiled at him, nodding ruefully. "A little, I must admit, but I had already foreseen the possibility, thanks to Quint's comment earlier. And I remembered how Uther had been caught in much the same way, by Lot's people hiding beneath nets, in a ravine. That was the time Lot's bowmen used the poisoned arrows, you recall?"
"Recall? Shit! I was there, right in the thick of it. One of those arrows hit my cuirass, smack between the nipples, knocked me back in my saddle and then skipped off, up over my shoulder. Must have missed my neck and jaw by a hair's width. That's why my bowels turn to water when I see bowmen. When those whoresons jumped up above us there, my sphincter clenched so tight I hurt my stomach muscles. So what's to happen now? We have the horses. Are we going home?"
"No. We're going to join Dergyll and his men at their camp. We'll eat with them, probably spend the night there, and perhaps head home tomorrow." I could see from Ded's frown that he was about to argue with me, so I cut him off before he could begin to speak. "He has a tale to tell me, and there's also an old friend of mine in his camp. And Ironhair is here, in Cambria, no friend of Dergyll's. That much I can tell you. The rest I'll learn later. Come, let's tell the others what we are about."
Ded's argument, whatever it might have been, remained unspoken as we joined the rest of our party and led them towards the low hill where Dergyll's party had sat. Once there, I ascended the hill to where I could see all my men, and then I told them all that had transpired, thanking them and congratulating them for their steadfastness under the threat of the massed bowmen on the hill. That done, I led them onwards, still in formation, to Dergyll's campsite, which contained, I estimated, somewhere in the region of six hundred men.
Dergyll's Pendragon men stood watching us in silence as we arrived, and although I sensed nothing inimical in their silence it was, at the very least, disconcerting. My own men, for their part, took the silence as their tutor and responded in kind, so that the meeting of the two hosts was one of the most unusual any present there had witnessed. I led our formation, riding alone in front, almost directly to the edge of the encampment and then sat there while my troops lined up formally behind me. Then, seemingly at the precise moment when the sounds of moving horses and harness behin
d me faded to silence, Dergyll himself came striding from one of the few tents at the centre of the Celtic gathering and bade us welcome in a great, stentorian, parade- ground voice. His shout, clearly heard by every man present, and his wide- armed signal for me to join him, were the signals for a general surge of noise and activity as his Celts relaxed all at once, breaking away to resume the activities interrupted by our arrival and speak among themselves as though nothing had happened. That was not strictly true, however, for I noticed many of his men move forward to address some of my own veterans, and I realized there were more than a few there who obviously knew each other from the days of the wars with Lot. Huw Strongarm and his group, I saw, were mingling easily among the others. I signalled to Dedalus to take over the dismounting and deployment of our troops and horses, and dismounted, waving casually to Dergyll to indicate that I would join him presently, then made my way to where big Huw stood among his own group and others who had joined them. Huw saw me approach and moved to join me, and I pulled him aside, turning my back to the main throng and keeping my voice low, so that he had to lean in towards me to hear what I said.
"This Dergyll," I began. "You said that when you came back home you went to offer your services to him before any other?"
"Aye, why?"
"Then you would trust him?"
"Trust him?" Huw twisted his face into a scowl that might have been a smile of some kind. "Trust's a chancy thing . . . Aye, I suppose I would trust him as soon as any other, and more than most. He was a good man when I knew him well, before these wars broke out."
"Could I trust him? That's what I'm asking you, Huw."
He sniffed and appeared to consider his next words carefully, then he nodded once, and then again.
"Aye. Aye, you may trust him, so be it you both make plain in what your trust lies vested."
"My thanks." I left him there and made my way directly to where Dergyll stood awaiting me. As soon as I had joined him, he turned away and led me to the large, leather tent from which he had earlier emerged, holding back the flap to give me access. I stooped and entered, anticipating darkness, but then was pleased to see that it was open to the sunlight, thanks to a folded- back flap in the roofing. There, on a pile of skins, I found my young friend Mod, now grown almost to full manhood, and the sight of him deprived me of the power to speak.
Mod had always been a pleasant lad, fresh-faced and enthusiastic about everything to which he turned his hand and his mind. At our first meeting, he had been no more than seven or eight years old, newly apprenticed to the Druid Daffyd, but already well versed in the first of the complex tales assigned to him, the tales that had always represented, to my pragmatic Uncle Varrus, a form of earthly magic.
The invading Roman legions had sought to stamp out the Druids in the course of their conquest of Britain, hundreds of years earlier during the reigns of the emperors Claudius and Nero. The reason for their persecutions lay in their accurate assessment of the ancient druidic priesthood as the lodestone of Celtic resistance to the Roman threat. Roman records of that time told of a great slaughter of Druids conducted as a meticulous military campaign, culminating in a massive, thoroughly coordinated drive under the command of Suetonius Paulinus to isolate the last surviving Druids and their supporters on the Isle of Anglesey, the traditional seat of Druidism, where, amid the destruction of their sacred groves of trees, the pestilential priests were finally, officially extirpated, once and for all time. After that, the druidic religion and its traditions had been decreed dead in Britain.
The facts of the matter were decidedly different. A living religion, with its entrenched beliefs and spiritual traditions, is among the most difficult things on earth to eradicate, and the Druids were the custodians not only of their people's theology, but of their history. In consequence, once the direction of the Romans' malice had been defined and the objective of their dire campaign had been identified, the people of Britain set out to protect, defend and conceal their Druids. A Druid could become an ordinary Celt by the simple expedient of changing his clothes, and hundreds did. By the same logic, ordinary people could appear as Druids by donning those same clothes, and once again, hundreds did. The peaceful, solitary Druids, depicted by the Roman invaders for their own purposes as ravening beasts who practised human sacrifice, emerged as doughty fighters in the course of that campaign because, through one of those anomalous upsurges of feeling that occur from time to time in every land and all societies given the proper stimuli, strong men took up the cause of the Druids and fought on their behalf, wearing their robes and dying fiercely, seeking to deny dominion and conquest to Rome. The difficulties faced by Suetonius in rooting out this troublesome priesthood were compounded by his need to deal with the concurrent mass revolt of Boudicca and her Iceni on the other side of the country, and he had withdrawn his legions from Anglesey in haste, their task incomplete, to lead them north and east across the heart of Britain. Many Druids died on Anglesey, but many more survived to carry out their tasks and teachings, quietly and in secrecy thereafter, throughout the hundreds of years of Roman occupation of their land.
The Roman overlords themselves, victorious eventually throughout Britain, remained vociferously exultant over their "conquest" of the Druids, an exultation dictated by their need to be perceived as invincible, and by their superstitious fear of what the Druids represented, for the Romans' understanding of what the Druids had been, and what they had stood for, had never been complete. Druids, thereafter, had been attributed magical, supernatural powers by the descendants of the Roman soldiers who had "destroyed" them.
Magic, Publius Varrus had written, the Druids assuredly had, but he saw it as the "magic" of trained memory, enabling them to carry in their minds, verbatim and intact, the history of their ancient people. Each Druid spent his life, from earliest boyhood, working to become the custodian of several lengthy tales, learning them scrupulously by rote from his own teachers, retelling them at length to his own people in his most active years for their pleasure, entertainment and enlightenment, and then passing them along in his late years to the next bearer of the Druid's burden, a young boy chosen, as he himself had been, for his mental agility, his observed characteristics and his demonstrated willingness to learn.
Mod had been such a boy, as had his fellow student Tumac, two years his junior, both of them given into the care of the Druid Daffyd, whose face had been familiar in Camulod throughout my youth. The Mod who faced me now, however, bore little resemblance to the sunny lad I had known for years. This one, wasted and gaunt, his eyes deep sunken in his skull, his skin grey with the pallour of mortal sickness, looked ancient, far beyond his years. I had no doubt, however, that he recognised me, for his face lit up and he attempted to smile and greet me, seeming to move at the same time to sit up. The effort was too much for him and he subsided backward, catching his breath with an audible hiss and losing consciousness even as I fell to my knees beside him, calling his name. Evident as it was to me that he was far beyond my reach, I tried nevertheless to revive him and bring him back to awareness, but was finally forced to accept that there was nothing I could do. I knelt there beside him, my cupped palm against his brow, feeling the fever that raged there, and gazed up at Dergyll in fury.
"What happened to him?"
Dergyll shrugged his shoulders eloquently. "He was stabbed through the chest and left for dead, more than a week ago. Two of my men found him by sheer accident. They were on their way to meet me. They knew him by sight, and they brought him with them. He hovered on the edge of death for a few days, then seemed to rally, growing stronger every day for the following four days. He was speaking coherently by that time and told us what had happened to him. Then, the day before yesterday, he began to cough up blood, almost as though something had broken or given way inside him. He is still lucid, but growing weaker, as you can see, with every hour that passes. I doubt now he will survive the day."
Unable to remain kneeling, I rose to my feet and stared out through the open f
lap in the tent's roof.
"He was a Druid, Dergyll. Who among your people kills a Druid?"
He cleared his throat. "There are a few who have no fear of being accursed, since they already are. He was not a Druid, though, Merlyn; merely an initiate, not yet fully trained. Not that it would have made a difference. Those who killed him killed his teacher, too."
"Daffyd?" I felt my head begin to spin and heard a roaring in my ears. Daffyd had nursed and tended my wife. "They killed Daffyd?"
"Aye. Him first. The boy there sought to stop it, and was struck down for it."
"Who? Who has done this?"
Dergyll fell to one knee and tucked some of the skins around Mod's body, which was shivering now. "Fever's what will kill him," he said, then brushed a lock of hair from the young man's forehead. Then he turned his eyes up towards me, where I stood over him.
"Carthac," he said, his voice barren of inflection. When I made no move to respond, he rose to his feet again. "Let's find some mead." Another man, who had been standing motionless in the tent since we arrived, unnoticed by me despite the smallness of the space, now stepped forward and took Dergyll's place beside the dying youth. Dergyll glanced at him and nodded, then motioned to me to leave. I turned and did as he bade me, casting one last, sad glance at Mod.
Outside, in the bustle of the busy encampment, Dergyll said, "That's Timor who's with him now. He's a Druid, too. He'll tend him well. Come."
I followed him in silence as he wended his way among the few tents that served his army, until we arrived by a blazing fire stacked over a clay oven. Several thick logs were grouped around the fire and Dergyll sat on one, pointing me to another. From the ground at his feet he picked up a leather-bound flask and uncorked it, tipping back his head to swallow a great draught, then handing it to me. It was mead, and I gulped it deeply, after which I sighed and stared into the fire.
"Tell me about this Carthac," I said.