by Whyte, Jack
This time, when I had finished, the King rewarded me with a contented smile and asked me to return the bishop's Cross. I did so, and this time saw Samson waiting patiently outside the tent, gazing off into the distance, his long arms wrapped about his chest. I mentioned this to the King, and he asked me to summon his son.
When Samson came in, the King beckoned to him to bend close, and whispered something into his ear. Samson went away frowning and returned with a powerful, magnificently made bow and a large, heavy quiver filled with arrows, which he stood holding at the foot of the bed. Ban nodded. "Give them to Clothar."
Deeply astonished, I took them from Samson's outstretched hands, then turned to the King. "Lord," I asked him, "what am I to do with these?"
He smiled, and when he spoke his voice reminded me of the rustle of dead leaves stirred by the wind. "Do with them what you will, Clothar. They are yours. They have been the death of me, but they are wondrous fine and should go to someone who will use them well."
I went rigid, realizing only then that these were the weapons that had struck him down— I saw the bright yellow fletching of the arrows and was stunned that I had not recognized them instantly. The large quiver was heavily packed, filled with at least two score of the bright, yellow-feathered war arrows.
"No," the King said sharply, waving his sound hand slightly but sufficiently to stop me and dispel what I was thinking. "No, don't throw them down. They are superb weapons. Learn how to use them, Clothar, and remember when you do that they arc merely tools for your direction and use. They had no will to harm me when they brought me down. That came from the man who used them. His was the urge to kill. Treat these with the respect they deserve, as powerful, well-crafted weapons, and they will serve you well, my son.
"Now kiss me and go with God, and I will pass your love and kindness to your father and mother when next we meet. But bear in mind your promise at all times from this day on: within the year, you must return to Auxerre and to Germanus."
His voice was very weak by then, and Samson's face was stretched tight with concern. I looked from one to the other of them, and then to Sakander, who sat gazing at me, his face still empty of expression. The surgeon nodded to me, as though granting me permission, and I stooped and kissed King Ban of Benwick for the last time.
6
Early on the morning of the day of the King's funeral, rubbing the sleep from my eyes, I emerged from my tent to find Samson deep in thought directly ahead of me, staring off into the misty distance and completely unaware of what was going on about him. It was a chilly morning, overcast and damp, and anyone could see it would turn into a nasty, rainy day once the lowering clouds had finished massing overhead and decided to purge themselves of their burden of moisture. I greeted him and asked him what was wrong, and he half turned towards me, surprised to find me there so close to him. I asked him again why he looked so glum, and this time he said, "Beddoc," then turned his head away again.
Beddoc, I knew, was one of his lieutenants, a clan chief who led nigh on a hundred warriors raised from his own holdings not far from Genava. I had met him on several occasions and found him difficult to warm to. He was a naturally dour man—a single glance at his dark, humorless face was all it look to see that—hut he was enormous, too, and the sheer sullen bulk of him, draped in drab armour and faded furs, emphasized the air of unfriendliness and inaccessibility that surrounded him.
"What about him?" I asked, when it became plain Samson was going to say no more.
"He's gone. Last night sometime, during the third watch. Left without anyone knowing why or where he was headed."
"He must have told some of his men where he was going."
"No, his men went with him."
"All of them? That's impossible. How could a hundred men break camp and sneak away without being seen? The guards must have seen them."
"They did, but all the guards on that watch last night were his men. He took them with him, too. Left the camp unguarded for the duration of the watch. Sellus, captain of the fourth watch, discovered they were gone when he rolled out to rouse his men."
I did not know how to respond to this because I had never heard of such a thing. A hundred men vanished in the night from a camp site with no one else noticing simply defied credence. I was so amazed by what he had told me that I completely missed the real significance of the event. "Surely someone must have seen something," I protested.
"Aye, we think someone did. A man called Castor, from among my own troops, another called Gilles, one of Chulderic's men, and some young fellow who worked with the commissary people. All three were found dead by their fires, wrapped in their blankets with their throats cut. We think they must have been awakened by the stir, and killed as soon as they were noticed."
My mind tried to process this incomprehensible development. Finally I found my tongue and heard my own question emerge as a bleat. "But why, Samson? To what end?"
My cousin glanced at me and then began to walk, quickly, beckoning me to follow him. "To what end? What about self-interest, will that serve as an end? Beddoc is ostensibly one of my lieutenants, but that is purely nominal and born of political necessity. The truth is that he is one of Gunthar's four closest henchmen. Always has been, since they were boys. I've been watching him ever since my father made his announcement deposing Gunthar as his heir and naming me in his stead, and you may be sure I've been watching very closely. Had Gunthar become king in Benwick, Beddoc would have become perhaps his strongest lieutenant and supporter, secure in one of the king's fortresses as a reward for ongoing loyalty and support. That's what he sees in his own mind, and that's what he seeks to protect now."
"By deserting, you mean? How so?"
"How not? He is scampering to warn my brother Gunthar of what has happened, and the knowledge is making me sick. I should have known he would do that. The gods all know I've known him long enough! I should have anticipated his reaction and posted guards discreetly to watch his every move. The King's decree formally making me his heir was public enough to stand as law, but no one at home will know of it yet. As soon as the King was wounded, and never anticipating any of what was to transpire on this matter of the succession, I sent off a messenger to bear the tidings home, but Gunthar knew nothing of the King's decree thereafter. When Beddoc reaches him with his news, my brother will simply announce the King's death and assume the kingship, and once the crown is on his head, validly or otherwise, it will require the strength of Jupiter himself to take it back from him. Gunthar is no weakling and he has no fear. My brother will not be governed by the normal, civil rules that should apply in such a case. 'Honour thy lather' has little appeal to one such as Gunthar when the honoring involves abandoning a claim to kingship. He lacks only sufficient strength to back his will. Beddoc has much to gain by warning him and pledging all his men to bolster Gunthar's strength. And understand me clearly, Gunthar will need all the strength he can muster if he is going to try to withstand me and defy the King's wishes."
"What of your other brothers?"
"Theuderic and Brach will stand with me. Gunthar has never done anything to endear himself to cither one of them. Nor would he be willing to share any part of what he thinks to gain with either one."
"And the Lady Vivienne?"
"What think you, that Mother would go against her husband's wishes after all these years?"
"No."
"No, indeed. I suspect that my father's decision, long-postponed as it was, sprang from my mother's doubts. The King was always something blind to Gunthar's faults. Mind you, Gunthar leaned backwards close to the falling point to disguise those faults from Father's awareness; it was the rest of us who had to bear the brunt of them. But still, even when he came face to face with the worst of them, our father would always seek and find some reason to explain why this and that were so extreme and why Gunthar might claim provocation in the face of circumstance. It was tedious for the rest of us, but we soon learned to live with it. Mother, however, could alwa
ys see through Gunthar and was unimpressed by the King's excuses. And as Gunthar grew older, she grew increasingly less pleased with how he was—how he is."
"So you are saying your mother influenced your father?"
Samson laughed, a single, booming bark that held no trace of humor. "Influenced him? Aye, completely! In everything he ever did. Of course she influenced him. How could she fail to? Mother is nothing if not direct, and we all know she is the strongest person in our lives. But in this particular instance, concerning Gunthar and his fitness to be king, aye, she has worked for years to change his mind."
"And you believe she was right to do so?"
"I do. Gunthar as king defies imagination. Don't you think she was right?"
"Yet you made no mention of that to Chulderic a few days ago when you discussed this very matter of the King's unwillingness to change his provisions regarding Gunthar."
He nodded. "True. I did not. I knew it and Chulderic knew it, but until the King spoke clearly on the matter of his final choice it would have been disloyal for either one of us to speak of it. Here we are."
We were in front of Chulderic's tent, and it was the center of a beehive of activity, with people running hither and yon, all of them shouting to each other to make themselves heard. I grasped Samson by the elbow, tugging him back before he could duck between the tied-back flaps.
"What? Come inside, we have but little time."
"No, wait, Samson. What will you do now, about Beddoc?"
He frowned. "Follow him, hope to catch him, but he has a long start."
"How long?"
"Perhaps an entire night watch: three hours."
"Is he on foot?"
"He's on a horse, but all his men are afoot, aye."
"And have you already dispatched men to follow him?"
"Aye, as soon as we discovered he had gone. But they'll not catch him, unless he falls sick or dies."
"And when will you leave?"
"Not until we have attended to my father's funeral rites."
"You think that wise? Why not leave now, as quickly as you can, and take the King's body with you? He won't suffer by being kept intact for another day or two and he will feel no pain now on the road. And if you leave now you'll be but hours behind Beddoc, instead of a full day, and Gunthar will have that much less time to decide what he will do."
Samson stared at me intently, his brows furrowed as he reviewed what I had said, and then he gave a terse nod. "You're right. That makes sense. Chulderic?" He shouted over his shoulder, preparing to swing away, but I stopped him yet again.
"Let me go now, with Ursus."
He peered at me. "Go where? What—?"
'To Genava! We have fast horses, Ursus and I, bred for stamina. Beddoc's people are all afoot. We can overtake them by nightfall. How far are we from Genava, forty miles? We can be there by tomorrow, before noon, ten miles and more ahead of Beddoc."
His eyes narrowed as he grasped what I was saying, and then his fingers fastened on my shoulder. He pulled me into the tent with him, shouting again for Chulderic, and within the hour Ursus and I were riding again towards Genava and whatever might await us there.
7
I could never have imagined what lay ahead of me as I followed Ursus out of King Ban's last encampment that day. The weather was foul when we set out and it remained foul for the duration of our journey—indeed, the rain was to persist in varying intensity for three entire weeks—and events and ramifications to those events were to occur within that time that I was simply unequipped to envision, let alone anticipate.
Riding through the driving rain that first morning, I would not have believed, had anyone suggested such a thing, that I might even come close to forgetting or forsaking the last promise I had made to King Ban, to return to Germanus in Auxerre. My faith was still strong in those opening days of what I would come to remember as Gunthar's War, and there was no room yet in my soul for self- doubts or for questioning the values I had been taught throughout my life. My beloved aunt, Vivienne of Ganis, awaited me at the end of my journey, less than forty miles distant, and I could scarcely wait to set my eyes upon her again.
I admit I knew that things had changed greatly in much too short a space of time, and that the welcome of which I had dreamed and for which I had yearned would not—could not—be as I had envisioned it. The Queen who would have welcomed me with love and joy a mere week earlier was now a widow, burdened by a newborn widow's grief, and a tormented mother, too, torn and distracted by the rivalry and conflict so suddenly flung up between her sons. I knew I would be fortunate indeed were the Lady Vivienne even to notice my arrival. All of that was in my mind, as I have said, and in my thinking as a man, but in the hidden recesses of my heart, wherein I was still merely a boy, I dared yet to hope that Vivienne of Ganis would welcome me with radiant smiles and open arms.
We caught up to Beddoc and his band late that afternoon and avoided them easily by leaving the road and sweeping around them, leaving more than sufficient room between us and them to ensure that they would have no suspicion of our presence. They had been marching hard all day, knowing they had a three-hour head start on anyone pursuing them, and to the best of my knowledge, none of them save Beddoc knew that Ursus and I existed, and not even he knew that we had swift horses at our disposal. Beddoc's sole concern was to reach Benwick and align himself with Gunthar before any word could reach the castle from King Ban's party. To that end, he had struck out and away in the middle of the night, knowing that no one he had left behind owned horses that were fast enough to overcome a three-hour lead. His men might be vigilant in watching for pursuers but, human nature being what it is, they would not suspect they might be overhauled as quickly as they had been, and even had they seen us by mischance, they would not have recognized us as representatives of King Ban's men.
Avoiding them was easy. We had known for some time before finding our quarry that we were gaining on them rapidly. The great road that stretched, magnificently straight, all the way from Lugdunum to Genava carried little traffic nowadays, even at the best of times, and this was far from being that. The threats of war and invasion were enough to deter all but the strongest and most desperate travelers, and so we had the rain-swept causeway all to ourselves, and we saw not the slightest sign of military activity anywhere as we progressed.
Solid and arrow-straight, the roadway provided us with significantly greater advantages than it permitted Beddoc and his men. We were heavily cloaked and well protected from the wind and rain, mounted on strong horses that moved swiftly and cared nothing for the driving downpour. Beddoc and his people, on the other hand, were afoot and heavily laden, making heavy going of their forced march, trudging through heavy, unrelenting rain under full military field packs, because when they had crept away from Samson's camp in the dead of night they had not dared to risk the noise of harnessing and stealing baggage wagons for their gear and equipment. They had left their cumbersome leather legionary tents behind, confident that they were but one night's sleep beneath the stars away from home, and so each of them lacked that heavy burden, at least. And so they plodded now through the pouring rain, huddled in misery, footsore, aching and feeling very sorry for themselves, their sodden clothing and ice cold armour chafing painfully wherever they touched skin.
We came closest to them at the point where they had stopped for their last rest of the day. Beddoc's party had been stopping once every hour, as marching legions always had from the earliest days of Rome's soldier-citizenry. Ursus had waved to me to slow down and moved out slowly ahead of me, scanning the roadside, and sure enough, we soon found the spot where Beddoc's men had spilled off the hard top of the road in search of relief from the road's surface and whatever shelter they could find beneath the canopy of the trees on either side. We reined in, and Ursus swung down from his saddle to search for whatever he expected to find. I sat straight in my saddle and dug my thumbs into the small of my back, under the edge of my cuirass, grimacing as I stretched an
d flexed my spine and stared ahead, over my horse's ears, along the tunnel of the road that stretched ahead of us.
Had the terrain here been as flat as the road was straight, we should have been able to see Beddoc and his party long before this, but the ground in this region undulated gently, in long, rolling ripples that stretched east and west, so that the road ahead rose and fell constantly. You might be able to sec as far as half a mile ahead at any time, but then the road would crest and fall away into the next gentle valley and be lost to sight. The sight lines here were impaired, too, by the foliage of the trees that had encroached almost to the edges of the road in some spots, so that their lower boughs appeared from a distance to sweep down completely, to brush the surface of the very stones.
That, I knew, was something new, because I also knew that there had once been a time, extending into the boyhood of King Ban's grandsire, when an entire department of the imperial civil service had existed solely to maintain the roads in central and southern Gaul. Under its supervision the great roads, so long and straight, had been maintained and regularly repaired, and huge swaths of cleared land, Fifty paces wide, had been kept free of growth on either side of each one. But after nigh on a hundred years of neglect and untrammeled growth, the protective borders were now choked with growth, and mature trees now towered close beside the roads themselves, close enough, in many cases, for their massive roots to have damaged the edges of the paving, heaving the paved and metalled surface upward and causing cracks and fractures. Those insignificant-seeming invasions of the roadbeds, according to the wisdom of Bishop Germanus, marked the beginnings of a process of disintegration that would inevitably, with the hungry assistance of time and weather, bring about the ruin of most of Rome's wondrous network of roads.