The Frankish soldiers left me there to die. I was no value to them. They had pursued us all the way from the Roman camp at Taginae, to seize Caledfwlch and deliver it to their avaricious young king. If that meant killing me, and Arthur, then so be it.
I would have crawled to my horse, but the Franks had taken her. In any case, I could not ride, or even stand. My injuries were too great. As I lay in the mud, weeping in pain, I knew I would never be whole again.
All my concern was for Arthur. I last saw him riding west, towards the border of Liguria. The Franks would give chase, but he was a better rider than the lot of them, and had a fine horse.
I had no means of knowing his fate. All I could do was lie there, a used-up wreck, and wait for the spectre of death. All my contempt for Narses and his crippled state came back to haunt me. I was the cripple now, alone and friendless, and destined for a miserable end.
God was not quite done with me. Somehow I lasted the night, and in the morning an unwanted saviour came in the form of a Perugian priest. Like the Samaritan, he knelt by my side, whispered soothing words, and did his best to bind up the worst of my wounds.
“Leave me, father,” I begged, but he would have none of it. He was an old man, lacking the strength to help me stand, so he went and fetched a couple of farm boys from the nearest village. They brought a cart, drawn by an ox, and lifted me aboard under the priest’s careful supervision.
For weeks I lingered, hovering between life and death in the back room of a farmer’s cottage. He resented my presence, and the duty of caring for me, but the old priest’s word was law in the village.
“You are not well, my friend,” my saviour said to me one chill winter’s morning, “we have done our poor best, but your leg…God denies us the skill to heal you entire.”
He was lonely in his little church, and wished me to remain as his assistant. I had no intention of ending my days as the lackey to some village priest, no matter how kind.
My left leg was badly twisted, but I could limp well enough with the aid of a stick. One moonless night, while the farmer was lying abed, swine drunk and shaking the rafters with his snoring, I crept into the stable and took his horse.
I had not ridden for weeks, and the horse was a fat old mare, ruined by years of heaving ploughs. Grunting with pain, I managed to fix a saddle and bridle onto her, opened the stable door, and led her out into the night.
We made a fine pair, one ruin riding another, but she bore my weight without protest for many miles, across the rolling Perugian landscape. I had half a loaf of rye bread in my pocket, and a little flask of water, and these sustained me until we reached the next village.
The details of my long, wearisome journey into the West need not concern these pages. I lived to find my son, to know whether he had escaped our pursuers, but encountered no word or sign of him.
I fell in with groups of travellers, merchants and pilgrims and the like, and passed through Frankia and Gaul, living off the charity of strangers. My damaged state, and claim to be a holy man travelling back from visiting Our Lord’s sepulchre in Jerusalem, melted the hearts of many.
Only once during my wanderings, in the far west of Amorica, did I pick up a faint trace of my son. I found an abbey, a small place perched on a bluff overlooking gentle seas, where the brethren were kind and offered me shelter.
The abbey was dedicated to Saint Armel, a local soldier-saint whose jawbone rested inside a jewelled casket on the altar.
“Armel is a recent saint,” explained the abbot, “when I was a boy, he came to Amorica from Britain, gravely wounded and accompanied by a few of his warriors. He was a great soldier in his time, the Bear of Britain.”
My heart thumped as I gazed upon the casket. I heard my mother’s voice, drifting across the long years, telling me how my grandsire’s body was never found after the final slaughter at Camlann.
“Arthur vanished into the mists,” Eliffer’s soft voice echoed in the vaults of memory, “borne away, some say, across the sea to the Isle of Avalon. He waits there, immortal, until Britain shall have need of him again.”
Armel is an Amorican variant on Arthur, but sufficiently different for my grandsire to shelter under it. Here, in this quiet house of God, he recovered from his wounds and spent his old age in prayer, far away from the endless treachery of men.
The uncertainty of Arthur’s demise gave rise to the legend of his return: a sleeping warlord, waiting under a cave in the mountains of Avalon, surrounded by his warriors. One day, the horn shall blow, and summon them all to their duty.
I could hardly speak as I looked upon the mortal remains of my grandsire. Taking my silence for awed reverence, the abbot continued his story.
“Some three months ago, a young man came to this abbey. He pretended to be a pilgrim, but I could tell he was a fighting man. The soldier shone through, even under his soiled and ragged garb.”
“He seemed to know all about our saint. I left him alone here to pray awhile. Then he left. He said little, and never gave his name.”
The abbot was taken by surprise as I started to weep, and kindly helped me kneel before the altar. I knew the identity of his mysterious visitor.
Arthur had come here to worship the remains of his ancestor. It seemed strangely fitting that they should come together in such a fashion. God had granted me the knowledge of their meeting.
I might have made my home there. The brethren would have welcomed me, a sinful man come to spend his last days in fasting and prayer. But I still cherished the hope of one day finding my son, and feeling his warm embrace again.
It was sheer vanity. I had been given all the mercy I deserved, and could not hope for more. I left the abbey, and wandered a little while longer, until God guided my faltering steps to the Abbey of Rhuys in the south of Amorica.
And Gildas. He took me in, the great churchman and scholar of our age, even though I was of the line of Arthur, whose memory he despised.
Here I have remained, inside these blessed walls, for the best part of twenty years. I have little hope of seeing my son again, but all my prayers go to him. Let him find peace, O Lord, and trust not in the words of princes.
As for Caledfwlch, I trust Arthur has long since thrown it into the sea. Let the Flame of the West be doused forever. Caesar’s sword was nothing but a bane, sent by the Devil to drag all the men of my blood to ruin.
Where are the horsemen now, where the heroes gone?
Where is the jewelled city, and where the towers
of silver and gold? Where are all the joys of battle?
Alas for the dimmed eye, the withered frame,
The brief glory of the warrior. That time is over,
Passed into night as it had never been
Into shadow.
Into shadow. The long night beckons for me, and I lay down my pen.
END
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The final part of the Caesar’s Sword trilogy takes place during the end of Belisarius’ first campaign in Italy (537-40) and the start of the campaign led by Narses (551-554). Despite his physical weaknesses and lack of military experience, Narses proved to be a superb general, and eventually drove the Goths out of Italy. When the Franks tried to invade the country, he smashed them too, and spent his last years repairing and reorganising the war-torn Roman homeland.
Narses succeeded where Belisarius failed, largely because the Emperor Justinian gave his favourite all the support he had denied his general. Justinian’s reasons for distrusting Belisarius are unclear. He may not have been ‘the last great general of Rome’, as Lord Mahon called him, but Belisarius was unfailingly loyal and did everything his Emperor asked of him. Perhaps Justinian was all too aware of the fate of previous emperors at the hands of ambitious generals, and was tainted by envy of Belisarius’ military talents.
Thankfully, the career of Belisarius did not end with his ignominious recall from the second Italian campaign. In 559 the aged Justinian summoned him from retirement to repel an invading
horde of Bulgars. With just a handful of his old Veterans and a rabble of civilian militia, Belisarius won a final victory against the odds, defeating the enemy host and driving them out of Roman territory. He died in 565, probably not blinded and in disgrace, as one old story claims, but peacefully on his estate at Rufinianae.
Saint Armel was a real person, a holy man or ‘soldier-saint’ living in Brittany in the early to mid-6th century. Various writers have identified him with the historical Arthur, claiming that the tale of Arthur’s journey to the Isle of Avalon after Camlann was inspired by his retreat into exile in Brittany. However dubious historically, the story has a certain charm, so I chose to make use of it.
As for the location of Caledfwlch – known to later generations as Excalibur – and the destiny of the second Arthur, Coel’s son, these remain a mystery…
Table of Contents
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AUTHOR’S NOTE
Flame of the West Page 20