Camulod Chronicles Book 8 - Clothar the Frank

by Whyte, Jack

  I had seen that Cato was carrying a sheathed sword tucked beneath his arm, a long-bladed cavalry spatha, and as I watched him present it to Lorco, I began to appreciate what I had lost and felt the first tug of regret. The spatha was Tiberias Cato's own sword, a superb weapon, probably one of the finest of its kind ever made. It had been bought for him many years earlier by Germanus himself, in Constantinople, shortly after Cato had signed up with the legatus as an Assistant Master of Horse, charged with teaching the garrison's troopers some of the new techniques and skills that he had brought back with him from the lands of the Smoke People, where he was raised. This was a distant eastern land, far beyond the boundaries of the Empire, a place where all people had straight black hair, skin of yellowish brown and strangely slanted eyes. Tiberias Cato's father had traveled there as a merchant, taking his wife and young son with him in his unending search for new and exotic goods to trade, and when he and his wife died there of a fever, their orphaned son was brought up by the local tribesmen and lived among them until he achieved manhood and was able to go in search of his own birthplace and his surviving kinsmen.

  That sword had gone everywhere with Tiberias Cato since the day it came into his possession. It had hung either from his waist or from his saddle on every campaign in which he fought for two decades and more. I was astonished to think that he would ever even consider giving it away, even although he had no real use for it nowadays. My astonishment, however, quickly gave way to chagrin that it had not been won by me.

  I heard applause from behind me and looked up to where Phillipus Lorco stood by his chair on the reviewing stand, flanked by Bishop Germanus and Brother Ansel and backed by everyone who had assembled to watch the day's events. All of them were applauding noisily, their eyes fixed on Lorco. I sniffed and shrugged off my disappointment, then made my way to the medical stand, where I knew I could at least find some cold water to drink. I had no injuries to speak of, apart from a few bumps and bruises that would soon fade and disappear.

  Less than an hour later, having bathed and changed into fresh clothing, I was standing stiffly at attention in front of the work table in Tiberias Cato's quarters, hearing him repeat the question he had growled at me earlier.

  "Don't feed me that swill," he barked when I responded as though I didn't know what he meant. "You know damned well what I mean. I asked you if he is that good a friend that you'd willingly give up a prize like that one today simply to make him look good—and don't try to deny what you did, either. I was watching you. You looked up so many times to where his father was sitting that you almost lost count of who was still in the arena. You were swiveling your head from side to side like a thief caught between two angry dogs."

  There did not seem to be much I could say in response without lying or blustering, and so I said nothing, fighting against the urge to grow angry and staring directly at the wall behind him, my eyes leveled just above his head. He was partially correct, I told myself. I remembered looking from father to son and perhaps back again, that much was true; but I had not done it as often as he had suggested, and not in the way he seemed to mean. And besides, I was far from sure that I had willingly done anything to give up the fight. The more I thought about that, in fact, the more convinced I became that I had done no such thing. Cato, however, was not interested in any self-justification I might develop.

  "Look at me, boy. Damnation, look me in the eye!" I did. "Humph! That's better. Don't ever be afraid to look a man right in the eye while he's tearing a piece off you with his tongue. As a matter of fact, you should teach yourself to be afraid not to look him in the eye. Everyone deserves a reprimand once in a while, because God knows everyone makes mistakes. But you show respect for the man who's dressing you down while he's doing it. It's his responsibility to do whatever he has to do to straighten you out and get you to mend your ways. Staring over his head as though he isn't there will just make him angry.

  "Now, one more time, from a different viewpoint. Would your friend Lorco have done the same for you? Think hard. If your stepfather, Ban of Benwick, had been up there on the stand, would Lorco have done for you what you did for him today?"

  "I don't—"

  "Think, I said, before you answer."

  "But—" He cut me off with a sidewise slash of his hand. I subsided, gritting my teeth, and began to think honestly about his question, since it was plain he would permit me to do nothing else. Would Lorco, in fact, have done the same thing for me, to his own cost?

  "And before you answer that one, here's another. D'you think he knows what you did?"

  Another question I had failed to consider. But that one was easier. I shook my head, emphatically. "No, Magister. He could not possibly know, because I don't even know if I did what you say I did. I thought about it, perhaps—no, I know I did—but only in the back of my mind. So, no . . . Lorco doesn't know."

  "Well, let me ask you this: if we could restart the battle, would you be tempted to do it again—to give up the fight to make your friend look good? Would you?"

  I was able to smile for the first time. "Not if I knew, going into the arena, what the prize was to be."

  "Ignore the prize; prizes can change. Would you do it again?"

  I thought about the last time I had seen Lorco, as I emerged from the bath house a short time earlier. He had been on his way in, walking towards the main entrance with its multicolored windows of tiny red- and gold-stained glass diamonds mounted between thin strips of lead. He had been talking to his father, his head tilted up towards the Duke's face and his left hand curled around the hilt of his new spatha, which now hung from a belt at his waist. Neither of them had seen me pass, so completely were they focused one upon the other. Now I remembered Lorco's smile as he gazed up at his father and I found myself smiling.

  "Yes, Magister," I said. "I would do it again."

  "Good!" The Master of Horse almost leaped to his feet. "That was decisive enough, even should it turn out to be a wrong decision."

  He paused then, one hand suspended in the air, as though about to bless me—something that he would never dream of doing, being both a layman and a warrior. "But you still have not answered the first question: would Lorco do the same for you?"

  I shook my head but spoke with conviction. "I can't say, Magister, one way or the other. I don't know whether he would or not, but I have just realized that, either way, the answer to your question is not important. Whatever I might have done out there, it felt like the right thing to do at the time. I certainly don't feel bad about having done it now. If, as I said, I did it."

  Cato shrugged. "Very well, then. You're probably right. He was bound to beat you eventually and today was his time. Lucky thing you're not going to be here for much longer. I doubt you'd enjoy being second best more than once."

  "Second best!" That stung me, but Cato had already begun to grin by the time I was able to think of a response, and I immediately swallowed what I had been about to say.

  He nodded his head. "Aye, right. Let's forget about it from now on, shall we? The bishop wants to meet with you before dinner. He's tied up now with Brother Ansel and some of the other senior brethren, but he told me to send you in to wait for him when I was done with you. Now get out of here and don't keep him waiting. And let's both hope you'll never have to depend seriously on a friend's willingness to make a sacrifice for you. Out!"

  I walked very slowly on my way to the bishop's chambers, dawdling unconscionably as I sought to grapple with new and strange ideas. I was beginning to realize, but only slowly and imperfectly because it ran counter to what I saw then as logic, that Tiberias Cato was not angry at me at all, even while he clearly believed I had lost that day's battle deliberately. But then, even as that thought was occurring to me and challenging my beliefs about the man I thought I knew, I found myself amending it as a new understanding began to build upon itself: Cato would never condone such a thing as a deliberate loss. That is what was so confusing about what I had been thinking. The idea of someon
e setting out deliberately to lose a fight smacked of cheating; there was a definite connotation of dishonesty within that premise at some level; and that, from all I had come to know and admire about Tiberias Cato, would have been anathema to him, violating every principle of conduct that he possessed.

  But then a new thought occurred to me, possibly the first purely philosophical thought I had ever had. The idea of someone deliberately choosing not to win was not at all the same thing as that person's making a deliberate choice to lose. As soon as I glimpsed that notion, seemingly solid in its logic, I snatched at it to examine it and devour it whole, but it eluded my grasp like smoke and left me feeling vaguely anxious, somehow mildly threatened, and aware that I had almost mastered a profound and tantalizing abstraction. I wanted to sit down there in a doorway by the edge of the thoroughfare to think the whole sequence of ideas through from front to back and from end to end, but then I noticed that the doorway in which I had paused was the one leading into the bishop's quarters and I was already too late to do anything but make my way inside.

  I heard voices from the bishop's day room as I passed along the passageway that ran between Germanus's private quarters and his working, public rooms, and was quietly relieved to know that the meeting of the senior clerics, whatever it concerned, was still in progress and I had not, therefore, kept the bishop waiting. I knocked nonetheless before entering his private rooms and was unsurprised when one of the lay brethren opened the door and, waving me forward with the broom he was clutching, ushered me into the familiar anteroom, where a wood fire burned briskly in an iron basket set in an ornate fireplace in the wall near the entrance. I thanked the man courteously and took the chair he indicated, beside the fireplace, and settled in to wait for the bishop. The lay brother, who had not spoken a word and whose name I did not know, nodded to me and then quietly withdrew into what I knew was the bishop's bedchamber, where he was obviously doing some kind of cleaning chore. A pocket of resin in one of the logs on the fire ignited and spat loudly, making me jump, and I gazed into the burning mass, trying to detect where the explosion had occurred.

  I had seen stone fireplaces indoors before—life in King Ban's great stone castle, with its thick walls, tiny windows and perpetually darkened rooms would have been intolerable without huge fireplaces, and logs that were large enough to be considered tree trunks were kept burning in them night and day, to banish the shadows and generate much-needed heat. Until I came to Auxerre, however, I had never seen a smaller version, in a smaller, brighter, better-lit household—and having said that, I must add that until then I had never even imagined the existence of smaller, brighter, better-lit households. I knew of only two kinds of dwellings: the stone huts that ordinary people lived in where I came from, which varied in size but never in design, being either round or square and consisting only of one common room, usually windowless; and the massive fortresses in which the rulers lived. The presence of light indoors, in an unfortified dwelling place, and the feelings of spacious airiness created by that light, had been the single most telling difference I found between life in Auxerre and the Bishop's School and life in the land in which I had grown up with King Ban and Queen Vivienne. Here, in the civilized fastnesses of north-central Gaul, where peace had reigned virtually uninterrupted for hundreds of years, people had learned how to live elegantly, in wondrous houses built with pleasure and entertainment in mind.

  Indoor fireplaces were yet uncommon here. I knew of only six others in addition to the one here in the anteroom to Germanus's sleeping chamber. He had worked and soldiered too long under a hot sun, the bishop said, to permit him to be warm away from the sun's direct rays, and so he kept a fire near him at all times, even going to the extreme lengths of building one into his house. I found it amusing but thought-provoking that every one of the other five similar fireplaces I had seen were in the homes of retired soldiers, men who, like Germanus, had spent years and even decades on campaign beneath desert suns.

  "Ah, Clothar, you are here. I hope you have not been waiting long?"

  I leaped to my feet, not having heard Germanus enter the room, but he was already waving me back into my seat.

  "Stay, stay where you are." He crossed the room to the long table beneath the glazed window opposite the fireplace and carefully placed the parchment scrolls he had been carrying so that they would not roll off and tumble to the floor, moving a heavy ink well against one side of the pile to ensure that they would stay. That done, he turned back to gaze at me in silence for some time. I gazed back, but although he was looking at me, I knew he was not really seeing me, for it was clear that his mind was elsewhere. His lower lip was thrust forward, covering the line of his upper one completely, and I knew that this indicated deep thought prior to some momentous announcement, for that expression, known throughout the school as the Bishop's Pout, appeared only in times of extreme deliberation and deep concern, and everyone who knew Germanus recognized it immediately.

  "Is something wrong, Father Germanus?" I asked, daring to interrupt his thoughts. He blinked, then seemed to shake himself although he made no visible move.

  "No." I could tell from his voice that that was true. "No, there is nothing wrong, nothing at all. It's simply that—" He broke off and frowned slightly. "It seems like an unconscionable time since last we spoke. When was it?"

  "Eight weeks ago, Father. The day before you left to go to Britain."

  "Aye, right, eight weeks ago . . . Dear Lord, the time is flying nowadays. Eight weeks, gone in a blink, and it seems but yesterday since I was talking to Ludovic about our plans for traveling, and that in itself must have been nigh on half a year ago." He paused, and then asked, "Did you really believe it necessary for your friend Lorco to win this afternoon?"

  I gaped at him, caught off balance yet again by the sudden emergence of this question when I had not expected it, but this time. having been through the exercise of discussing the matter with Tiberias Cato, I responded more quickly and more easily.

  "Yes, Father. I did."

  "Hmm. Why? Do you object to my asking?"

  "No, Father, of course not, but Tiberias Cato and you both noticed what happened. Do you think anyone else saw?"

  Father Germanus shook his head tersely. "No, I doubt it. Cato and I noticed it because we both know you as well as we do, and we saw . . . shall we say, a certain lack of fire and energy in your attack? Duke Lorco took great pleasure in his son's prowess. You intended that to be the case, did you not?" I nodded. "I thought so. Why?"

  I shrugged. "Lorco is my friend, sir, and his father's esteem is important to him. I saw that today, and I first noticed it yesterday, when word came of his father's visit. It was good that he should win and make his father proud."

  The bishop smiled a tiny smile and raised his right hand to bless me. "Peace be upon you, then. I shall beseech God in my prayers to furnish you with friends worthy of such loyalty and trust."

  I smiled. 'Thank you, Father."

  "Do not thank me, boy. Friendship is God's gift for fortunate men to share. It is a wonderful phenomenon and it exists according to its own rules and regulations. Its criteria are unique unto itself and it is restrained by none of the usual demands that people place upon other people's behaviour."

  Once launched upon a favorite topic—and I knew by this time that the bishop loved to talk about the criteria governing friendship—Germanus could be virtually unstoppable. I sat back and listened for a long time as he held forth on all that he believed about friendship, and much of what he told me that afternoon is still as alive in me today, and as fresh and credible, as it was when I first heard it that day.

  He talked about the nature of friendship and about its durability; about how it could, and often did, spring out of nowhere, fully formed to take both members of the relationship by surprise, and then he went on to describe how, at other times and in other circumstances, it might grow slowly and almost unnoticeably, unsuspected by either participant. He pointed out to me, too, that friendship is
untrammeled and unconstrained in its acceptance in a friend of appearances and personality quirks that would be unacceptable in anyone else; and from there he progressed to a discussion—albeit one sided—of the nature of friendship and its relationship to love.

  I listened, fascinated, to everything he had to say, hanging on his every word and feeling no urge to speak or to intrude upon what he was unfolding to me.

  Love, he maintained, is an essential part of friendship, although it might be seldom mentioned by the friends themselves, but friendship may not necessarily be a part of love. Physical love—sexual love—and the state of being in love he explained as being conditions that completely enfold two individual people, fusing them emotionally and inexorably into a single unit of awareness and rendering them generally oblivious to everything else that is taking place in the world about them. They are a pair, but in the fiery singularity of their love for each other they exist as a single entity that shuts out the rest of the world.

  Friendship, on the other hand, while also confined to two people, involved each of the two less exclusively and far less selfishly. Lovers demanded closeness—propinquity was the word he used—but friends could remain friends at opposite ends of the world and their friendship was undeterred by years of separation. Each friend in a pair might have many other friends, and those friends might like or dislike any of their friend's other friends, but the initial pair's friendship was a thing unique to the two of them, and though they might choose to extend the privilege of their friendship to others, their own friendship remained strictly and at all times a private matter between the two of them. I blinked, I recall, when he said that, but I managed to follow it without difficulty.