by Jack Whyte
"Can we bypass Londinium and go directly to Verulamium?"
Lucanus shook his head briefly. "No. Not easily."
"Why not?"
He shrugged his shoulders. "Our horses, and the river, the Thamis. We crossed it two days ago, when it was narrow. Now we're on the wrong side of it and it's too broad to swim and too deep to ford. We have to bridge it and the only bridge is at Londinium."
"What about a ferry?"
He shook his head again. "I doubt we'd find one big enough. We have two hundred men and two hundred horses, and wagons. That's a big river, Caius, probably bigger than you've ever seen."
"Damnation!" I rose to my feet. "Very well, here's my decision." I looked around me again, at the trees that hemmed us in. "As soon as we get out of this forest, if we ever do, I want to get off the road. We'll travel overland. That will allow us to hunt as we travel, so we can feed the men. If we come across any farms that look even remotely prosperous, we'll buy grain for the horses, otherwise they can graze as we move.
"When we approach Londinium, we will stop and make camp. Then I myself will go into the town—"
"With a suitably armed escort."
"Right, with a small party, to check conditions for myself before we lead the men in. I'll try to find out what's happening in Verulamium—somebody should know—and when I think the way is clear, I'll send word back for you to bring in the remainder of the party. We'll get to the other side of the river as quickly as possible, and strike north immediately for Verulamium."
He stared at me for several moments and then nodded agreement save for one minor proviso: he would ride with me into Londinium. He would not trust me, he said, to recognize a rampant plague even if the stench of it overpowered me.
About ten miles further on, we emerged from the forest. We had been on a gradual but definite gradient for five miles by that point, and the trees petered out quite abruptly, giving way to high, rolling moorland. We had not seen another living soul since leaving Pontes. I gave the signal to leave the road, and we swung north-east, making good time over hard, grassy ground for the rest of the day.
We stopped late in the afternoon and made camp in a lush, grass-filled meadow by the side of a clear, fast-flowing brook. I had sent out a hunting party earlier to range ahead of us, and they had fared well, bringing back three fair-sized deer and a huge wild pig. The commissary people set about their business immediately, and soon the smells of roasting meat filled the air and set everyone's stomach juices churning in anticipation of the feast.
The following morning, the weather held fine, sunny with only occasional showers, and again we made good progress. Donuil was a huddled clump of misery as he was each morning, his long body still unused to riding great distances every day. He swayed wordlessly on his horse's back as he followed close behind me, and I took care to require no errands of him before noon, knowing that as the day progressed, he would regain control of his loosening muscles and begin to improve visibly. It happened every day, and each day the recuperative process took up slightly less time.
By early afternoon he was talking again, his usual, cheerful banter, and I had started to believe there might be a real chance of making a horseman of him after all. We were riding together at the head of the column, enjoying an unusually long spell of sunshine between squalls, when Donuil, whose eyes were far keener than anyone else's in the group, picked up a movement cm the ridge far ahead of us.
"Someone coming, Commander." He nodded towards die movement he had seen. "Straight ahead. Must be some of our scouts."
"How many?" I could see nothing but I did not doubt him.
He screwed up his eyes, concentrating, and it was several moments before he answered, "One. It's Orvic."
I glanced at him, irrationally irritated by this evidence of his amazing visual superiority.
"Damnation, Donuil, how can you know that? I can't even see him moving yet!"
He smiled, his eyes still on the approaching figure. "It is Orvic, Commander, and his hounds. That's why I thought at first there might be more than one man."
I saw them then, the tall, long-haired, long-legged Cambrian Celt with his golden tore around his neck, and his three great wolfhounds ranging around him. He was a distant kinsman of mine, a nephew of my grandfather, Ullic Pendragon. Orvic was a man unique even among his unique clan, for he was renowned as both fighter and hunter, yet even more famed for his skills as a bard and as a breeder of wolfhounds. He had decided that he would ride with us to Verulamium to attend the debate. He was no Christian and had no interest in the theology to be debated, but he had never visited that part of the country and he had thought it fitting that we should allow him to escort us.
When he rode up, we exchanged greetings and then waited for him to tell us why he had come back. I had long since accepted the futility of trying to rush Orvic in anything, but he came to the point with surprising swiftness, speaking directly to me. "Where are you going?"
I raised my eyebrows at his tone, but answered him directly. "To Londinium, to see what's happening. Why?"
"Forget it. You have no need to see what's happening there."
I frowned. "How can you know that?"
His frown matched mine. "Because I've been there. Believe what I tell you."
I glanced around me at my five companions. They were all watching Orvic closely, no suggestion of doubt visible on any of their faces. I turned back to the big Celt. "What's wrong there? Is it inhabited?"
"Inhabited? Aye, it's inhabited, course it is, but it's no place for you or your people."
"Why not?"
"Pestilence of some kind. It's not what I'd call rampant yet, but it's there. There doesn't seem to be wholesale death, but whatever it is, it's created chaos in the town. There's fighting everywhere, and nobody seems to know who's in charge, or who's fighting who. There seem to be four, perhaps five separate factions and there's more corpses in the streets from the violence than from the sickness. The forum's a slaughterhouse and the basilica's on fire, along with a good portion of the rest of the town."
"How did you find all this information? Were you inside the town itself?"
"Aye, and outside it, looking in."
Lucanus spoke up. "Then you may be carrying the sickness."
Orvic looked at him, then back to me. I could have sworn he was on the point of smiling. "Aye, I might. But I doubt it. I didn't get close enough to anyone to catch anything except words, except for one fellow, and he was outside the town."
"And?"
"And that's all. He was healthy as a horse and bleeding like a sow. He was a mercenary, from my part of the country, if you can believe it. I didn't know him, though. He'd fallen off the wall—been thrown off, really. I sewed up a gash in his thigh and splinted the bone, and he was happy to talk to me. Told me he started out years ago working for the Grain Merchants Guild, but that's long gone, ten years ago or more, and he ended up with a gang of ex-soldiers who looked after their own interests and nobody else's. There's no organized authority in the town. Basilica's been deserted for years, except for squatters. Town council stopped functioning more than five years ago and the so-called better class of citizens are all either deader they've moved away. I told you, it's chaos—a rats' nest. A good place to stay well clear of."
My horse reared at a fly bite, taking me by surprise and almost throwing me, and I wrestled him back under control, sawing on the bit and venting some of my frustration on the poor beast. By the time I spoke again, I had my feelings as tightly under control as the horse.
"We have no choice." My voice was stony. "We have to go in to cross the bridge."
"Find another way, Merlyn." He looked me straight in the eye. "There's nothing but heartache in there for you."
"Nonsense! We have two hundred men. We'll carve our way through if we have to."
Orvic hawked and spat, an eloquent statement of disdain. "You might take them in, but you won't take 'em all out again. You've got wagons, provisions and horses, and
all of them make you fine targets. Streets are narrow and the roofs are high. It's less than a mile from the north wall to the river and the bridge, but you'll never make the transit. As soon as you approach the gates, even before you enter, all those warring bastards in there will unite against you. They'll block every street junction, then line every rooftop and cut you to pieces from above. Your men will have no room to manoeuvre, or even to dodge the missiles. And then they'll barricade the entrance to the bridge against you. Believe me, Caius Merlyn, the bridge is not available to you for crossing the river."
"Damnation! Then what do you suggest? Should we sprout wings and fly?"
"Aye, if you can." He grinned as he said the words, but there was no trace of humour in his eyes. "But it might be more realistic to skirt the city to the east, upriver, and find a ferry or a ford."
"And what if we find neither? Do you know where there are any?"
He jerked his head. "No, but you'll find one or the other, sooner or later. People do cross over without having to go through Londinium. What will it cost you? A day? Two days at the most, and you'll keep your troops alive and healthy. Increase your speed and your daily travel for the next two days after that and you'll make up the time you've lost."
What he said made sense. There had to be either a ford or a ferry not too far upstream. I decided to accept his evaluation of the Londinium situation, and signalled the dismount, giving my men the chance to relax and stretch their legs. Then, with Orvic's assistance, we spent the next hour discussing ways and means of circumventing the town and its dangerous bridge.
That night, after our plans had all been made, I wondered at myself. I have never been good at taking advice. An analyst of advice I was, certainly, in that I always took pains to consider—-and occasionally defer to—the opinions and viewpoints of those around me. I usually chose, however, to cleave to my own judgment, trusting my own instinctual responses to the responsibilities I alone bore. That, I had learned from my father. His credo on leadership had been simple: a leader—any leader—bears full and final responsibility for the welfare of the people he leads. In success, he might be magnanimous in the sharing of credit, but in failure, the fault, the responsibility and the consequences are his alone to bear. On that phase of our expedition, however, I had accepted advice twice, from two subordinates, without any reservations, on two consecutive days. On each occasion that advice had run contrary to what I myself would normally have chosen to do, and upon it I had based decisions that I would not normally have made. In the light of what happened afterward, and aided by years of hindsight, I find it impossible not to believe I was under the influence— mystical or supernatural—of powers over which I had no control.
Publius Varrus wrote prolifically towards the end of his life, setting down his recollections of all that had happened to him since he met my grandfather, Caius Britannicus. It used to amuse me that, each time he was faced with the task of describing some event or occurrence that he did not fully understand, Uncle Varrus would resort to the assertion that he was not a superstitious man, but...
At this point in my tale, I understand fully, for the first time, how Publius Varrus felt at such times. I, too, am not a superstitious man, but I believe that journey to Verulamium was fated to take place. And I also believe that the only reason it took place was to bring about a series of meetings that would not—could not—otherwise have occurred.
Orvic had been right about the cross-river traffic upstream from Londinium. Less than a day's march upriver from the town—a progress greatly hampered by our wagons and the lack of a road—we arrived, unsighted and unchallenged, at a regular crossing point. A deeply rutted track led us alongside the great river to where the thick growth of willows and scrub lining the bank had been cleared to accommodate a primitive ferry. This device, no more than a large, floating platform, was anchored and operated by a system of ropes and pulleys, all firmly fastened to two massive oak trees, one on each side of the river. When we arrived, the ferry lay on the opposite side from us, untended, and it had obviously been there for some time, for the river had receded in the hot weather and the craft lay high and dry on the mud of the riverbank. We couldn't move it at all, from where we were, although we put as many men on the pulley ropes as we could. The river itself was wide and muddy at the crossing, flowing slowly and placidly with no visible eddies and no indication of strong currents. One of our younger squadron leaders, claiming the ability to swim like a fish, volunteered to swim across and test the current and the depth of the stream. He came to his feet in midstream, with his head clear of the water, and called to us that there was no current to speak of.
A dozen men and horses followed him to prise the ferry free of its muddy berth, and in less than two hours, our entire force had crossed over safely and easily, the wagons on the ferry and the troopers on horseback. We camped that night close by the riverbank, screened from the other side by the fringe of thick willows.
The following day, we set out eastward again, following the track leading from the ferry. The track soon petered out, however, completely overgrown, and after that our pace slowed to a crawl as we travelled through heavily forested, trackless land. The trees were mainly great oaks, ash and beeches, so that there was little undergrowth to hamper our passage, and we would have been able to make good time had it not been for our heavy wagons. Their huge wheels sank into the soft forest floor almost to the axles, and their immense width made them difficult to manoeuvre among the trees, while the dead trees and boughs that littered the ground often blocked their passage completely, so that our troopers spent as much time on foot as they did on horseback, labouring like slaves to remove the worst of the obstacles and free the wheels.
Late in the afternoon, towards sunset, we emerged without warning on the verge of the great Roman road leading north-westward from Londinium to Verulamium. There was no fresh meat for our fires that night. The noise of two hundred horsemen and heavy wagons crashing through the forest had banished all the wildlife for miles around. The trees that lined the road closely on both sides were much younger than the forest giants beneath which we had been travelling all day. They were tall and thin, much faster growing than the huge, stately oak, elm and beech trees of the deeper woods, but their outflung branches had already met far overhead, turning the road into a green, leaf-roofed tunnel.
The first milestone we came to told us we were thirteen miles north-west of Londinium. Two miles further on, just as I was beginning to worry about finding a suitable campsite, we emerged into an open meadow with a clear, gurgling stream and a covering of new saplings growing among the charred remnants of another old forest fire. The sun set minutes before we reached the spot, and by the time we had set up our encampment it was almost fully dark, thanks to the high trees on all sides of us.
We ate by the light of the cooking fires, and I decided to allow the men to rest the following day, while I myself went hunting with our Celtic bowmen.
XXXII
It was a long shot—perhaps too long, I thought—but the stag made a perfect target, silhouetted against the cloudless sky, and since mine was the most powerful bow, Orvic indicated with a nod that the shot was mine. I raised Publius Varrus's huge bow and sighted carefully, drawing the taut, thrumming string back all the way to my ear, feeling the power of the mighty weapon and visualizing the flight of the arrow it would hurl into the teeth of the light wind. The stag stood on the skyline at the crest of a hill, about two hundred paces directly ahead, but separated from us by a narrow, deep, brush-choked gully. We had been stalking him and his two consort does for two hours, and this was as close as we were likely to come to him, thanks to the depth of the ravine between us. In the space of the few heartbeats between my full draw and release, I found time to admire him as he stood poised between two trees, his head raised so that his massive antlers lay along his spine, his gaze fastened on something that had alerted him on the far side of his crest. He was completely unaware of us, masked as we were from his sig
ht by a thin screen of leaves and from his keen nose by the wind that blew directly from him to where we stood.
I exhaled slowly through my nose, and released the arrow, feeling it launch straight and true, and as I did so the stag disappeared. So abrupt was the transition from stationary target to empty skyline that I felt a superstitious shock at what seemed like magic.
"Shit!" The voice was Orvic's, and as I heard the exclamation I saw the stag again, bounding down the side of the ravine straight towards us, closely pursued by the two does.
Even as I saw him, he leaped to his right and was lost among the rank brush that filled the gully. Only then did I lower my bow and turn to the others.
"What happened?"
Orvic's face was filled with disgust. "Something scared him. Something on the other side, something he saw or heard."
I glanced at Donuil and Curwin, neither of whom had spoken. "Either of you hear or see anything?" They shook their heads. "Well," I went on, "we might as well move on. We won't get another shot at—"
"Quiet," Orvic hissed. "Listen!"
