by Jack Whyte
On my return, however, Ambrose was nowhere to be found. Vortigern's camp was filled with the noises of comradeship and celebration, but my brother sat in none of the gathered groups. Eventually, after my second fruitless circuit of the fires, I approached the central gathering again, the noisy, relaxed group of officers and clerics lounging informally among a cluster of large fires in the space in front of Vortigern's own large tent. Few of them paid any attention to my arrival and I made my way directly to the group that held Vortigern himself, with Lucanus, Pellus, Cyrus Appius, Jacob of Lindum and several others unknown to me. The sight of Jacob gave me pause and I changed direction to avoid being seen by him, moving around the group until I stood behind him, out of the direct light of the fire. He, like Ambrose, had seen me only in my armour, anonymous beneath my heavy helmet. The sight of my yellow hair and my uncanny resemblance to his "nephew" might shock him and give rise prematurely to the kind of speculation I knew I had to avoid until I had had occasion to speak to Ambrose.
Pellus had been saying something as I approached, and now Jacob himself was answering, his voice urgent as he sought to acknowledge and yet refute whatever it was that Pellus had been saying. Every eye in the group, including Vortigern's, was on Jacob, and as I scanned the faces of those seated opposite, failing to find Ambrose among them, I was listening with half an ear to what was being said.
".. .the same at first, when I first heard of it. My reaction was exactly the same as yours. Foolish, I thought. Stupid and dangerous and irresponsible. Those were my first responses. But that was more than ten years ago, before I met Vortigern, and before I met the people he'd brought in. Since then I've changed my mind. I know them now, all of them, and I can accept what's happening... I'm not completely comfortable with it, even now, I must admit, but in comparison with the alternative, there's not much I could say with confidence to prove he's wrong. I mean-"
"But he has to be wrong!" This was Pellus again, turning to Vortigern even as he spoke. "Will you not admit, King Vortigern, there's room for grievous error in your thinking? These are barbarians, when all's said and done.. .Outlanders just like the people against whom, through them, you seek protection. Their background, their mores, their very way of thinking is alien to our own way of life."
Vortigern was staring directly at Pellus, the hint of a frown marring his handsome face, and knowing now what they were discussing, I sat down unobtrusively on the end of a log, safely obscured from the general view by the broad back of the man in front of me. Earlier in the day I had clearly recalled my father talking of King Vortigern: of how he was tempting fate by allowing foreign mercenaries to settle in his lands, paying them for protection with holdings of their own and thereby granting them a foothold and a promised future in Britain. Acceptable enough, he had pointed out, if only one could somehow guarantee that these same barbarians would not wish, at some time in the future, to share their new-found freedom, wealth and bounty with their friends and families, relatives and neighbours still struggling for survival beyond the sea. Someday, my father had foretold, these newcomers would arise in power and stretch themselves, claiming the land as theirs, and in so doing dispossess their hosts.
Silently, with the others, I watched Vortigern's face and waited for him to speak, admiring the effort with which he restrained his understandable wish to savage Pellus. Finally he cleared his throat and spoke, his voice clear, almost a monotone in its lack of emphasis, the hint of a gracious smile quirking his lips.
"There may indeed be room for error in my thinking, Master Pellus, but Jacob, here, spoke of alternative considerations and I would ask you to consider the alternative to my having any thoughts at all in this matter..." He allowed that to hang there, vibrating in the silence for a moment, before he continued, "Would it be better not to think at all, and therefore to do nothing? To wait, and sit back, and see my lands and my people savaged and laid waste by an endless plague of raiders from all directions?" He shook his head, still calm. "No. I can assure you, that is what Would have happened before now—years ago—had I done nothing. Because we, my people and I by ourselves, were powerless in the face of the onslaught that threatened us even before the legions left."
In spite of my own misgivings, I found myself applauding Vortigern's dignity, his decorum and his complete lack of anger. He continued to speak, looking around at all the faces watching him.
"You must understand, all of you, that these people I have...brought in...came at my invitation. They were not invaders; not pirates or savages. I sought them out, in their own land, and asked them to come here. Their fleets have made the seas around us safe again and their strength on land bars our territories to the invaders from the north. Their leader Hengist was my friend during my boyhood. He is my friend now. I know him well, him and his people, and I respect them. I also employ them in a manner that benefits both parties. We have given them land in return for their fighting skills and their assistance in protecting what is ours. I know they are alien and Outlanders, but our common interest in protecting what we hold together will lead to prosperity for both our peoples. There is a Greek word— symbiosis—that describes the situation. It involves two different species, with completely differing needs, coexisting in harmony and to mutual benefit. That is what we have achieved in Northumbria, and it is working well."
There was silence after this surprising speech as Vortigern's listeners took time to assimilate what he had said. Finally Pellus shook his head. "Well, King Vortigern," he said, "I've never heard of your symbiosis, but I know what makes sense to me and what does not. This with the Outlanders seems to me like sleeping with an adder in your bed. Better your bed than mine." He cleared his throat, shaking his head again. "I have no wish to offend you. I have shared your fire and your food and your drink and will not fight you with words you have no wish to hear. Your Outlanders are your affair and your lands lie far to the north-east, while ours are to the south-west. I pray your venture will work out for you, but hope never to see your 'allies' near to Camulod."
Vortigern smiled and stood up, bringing his people to their feet with him. "You never will, friend Pellus, but a time may come when you and yours might be glad to follow our example. For now, I will leave you with your discomfort, and free to speak your mind without fear of offending me. Good night."
He turned and made his way into his tent, and his going was the signal for the dissolution of the group around his fires. I rose quickly and left before anyone could notice that I had been sitting there in the shadows, and as I walked through the encampment towards another fire, I saw Ambrose ahead of me, crossing to my left. I called his name and waved so that he stopped and waited for me to approach him, that same look of slightly bewildered, almost hostile curiosity on his face. I stopped almost within arm's reach of him.
"You and I need to talk. Will you walk with me?" He nodded, wordlessly, and walked beside me as I led him through the lines of tents and out into the field where I had walked before. Once away from the dazzle of the campfires, our eyes adjusted to the darkness and the illumination from the gibbous moon in the cloudless sky was more than adequate to light our way until we approached a clump of large boulders that lay far enough from anywhere to be safe from casual listeners. There I stopped., "This is far enough."
"Far enough for what?" There was caution in his voice, and curiosity, and a hint of latent hostility.
"For us to talk without being overheard."
He shook his head, a tightly controlled, tense flick, as though dislodging a fly or a buzzing insect. "Why should we fear, or should you fear being overheard?"
"Because I have things to say for your ears alone."
He looked around, leaned back against a boulder and crossed his arms in front of him. "Well?"
I turned slightly away from him, glancing back towards the distant fires. These next few moments were going to be very important. "Tell me about your mother," I said. "What is her name?"
"Boudicca,'' he said, and nothing more. The nam
e surprised me.
"Boudicca? The same as the Warrior Queen?"
"The same." There was no hint of levity about him. "My mother traced her descent directly from Boudicca, the Queen of the Iceni."
"Through three hundred years?"
He gazed at me, one eyebrow raised in the way my father had, and the way his father had before him, and for a time I thought he was not going to answer me. Then he said, "Yes, through three hundred years. You find that strange? Our blood is pure, unmixed and undiluted."
I frowned. "Your father was Roman, you said."
He nodded. "An exception to the rule. There have been others, but on the whole, not many. The Iceni of today are still the Iceni Caesar's legions fought. The same who burned the town of Camulodunum and almost took this country back from Rome."
"But you don't call yourselves Iceni today."
He shook his head, the start of a small smile on his face. "Nor did we then. It was the Romans who called us by that name."
"Of course," I said, matching his smile. "Where is your mother today?"
His face set into a mask. "Why would you wish to know that?"
I shrugged. "Mere curiosity. Is she in Lindum?"
"No." The negative was abrupt, accompanied by another jerk of his head. "I don't know where she is. I never knew my mother. I was raised by her sister, Gwilla, and by Jacob, her husband." He clearly had no more to say than that, but I could not settle for incomplete knowledge.
"You say you don't know where she is, not that she is dead. Is she in fact alive?"
"I told you, I don't know. No one does. She left me with her sister when I was a child and she disappeared. She hasn't been seen again."
"I see. And your father died before you were born?"
"Yes."
"And you are, what, twenty-eight?"
He frowned again. "How do you know that with such authority?"
I smiled. "Because you are six months younger than I am, and I'm twenty-nine." As he started to speak, I held up my hand to silence him. "Ambrose," I continued, "I have a story to tell you, and it is one that you may not enjoy, but you will be able to judge its truth for yourself, in the listening. All that I ask is that you let me tell it without interruption, for if you interrupt, with questions or denials, we'll be distracted and the whole story might not come out. Will you listen? And not interrupt, even though I promise you it will not be easy?"
He straightened up from his slouch and pressed his hands together, breathing deeply and finally emitting an explosive sigh. "You make it sound ominous, but yes, I will listen without interrupting you, even if what you tell me makes me want to kill you."
"I hope it won't," I said, and then I began. I told him the entire tale of Picus Britannicus and the wound he had taken, and the manner in which he had killed his host, Marcus Aurelius Ambrosianus. It took a long time, and before I was half-way through he had turned his back on me, leaning his weight against the stone behind him and staring off into the darkness so that I could not see his face. When I had finished speaking, a long silence stretched between us. I made no attempt to break it, knowing instinctively that he had heard enough of my voice and my words and that, whatever was going on in his mind now, he would take his own time in reacting to my message and the turmoil it had brought into his life. Finally, after a long stretch of utter stillness, he spoke without turning towards me, his voice drifting backward to me over his shoulder.
"So be it," he said. "I accept and believe your story. My mother was a whore and my father an ineffectual fool and a murderer, and your father—who is suddenly my father— killed him. Killed them both, in fact."
I waited, but he said no more, and I realized with mounting disbelief that he had dismissed the major part of what I had told him; had failed, in fact, to consider any part of it other than that sole aspect upon which he had seized. Stung to anger in spite of my resolve to accept whatever he might have said, I snapped, "I made no judgment on your mother! I did not know her, nor did you, so neither of us may presume to know her mind or to impugn her motives. And her husband, your father as you call him, was an old man, driven by an old man's despair to save his honour."
That brought him swinging round to face me, his eyes blazing, even in the moonlight. "What honour? My mother and your father combined to deprive him of all honour!"
I bit back my own angry retort, forcing myself to take a deep breath and hold it before speaking again. Then I chose my words carefully, wishing to give him no cause to fight me, and willing my voice to sound calm and reasonable.
"Ambrose, we have no cause to believe that...and the evidence would seem to indicate that it's untrue, in any case."
"Evidence!" His voice shook with scorn and wounded fury. "What evidence? What need is there of evidence? It is evident—sublimely evident—that my mother was depraved. Her own actions condemn her to anyone with ears to listen to the story of her infamy...."
He subsided into silence and I drew another deep breath, and now when I resumed he did not attempt to interrupt me.
"Listen to me," I went on in a much gentler voice. "I have been thinking deeply about that since I first saw you and realized what must have happened..." I paused, aching with the need to help him. "You have said you believe my tale. Well, if you do, then you must believe all of it. It's not good enough simply to hear the parts you want to hear. The whole deserves examination, not merely the parts."
"That's ridiculous." His voice was the distillation of bitterness. "What is there to examine? To hear it is to believe it at first draught. The woman—my...my mother—was a faithless wanton. Without her faithlessness, there would have been no tale to tell."
"No, Ambrose, you are wrong. That is not so." My heartbeat had surged suddenly, for I had seen his error, and its incongruity, even as he spoke the words, and now I hurried on, trying to articulate die thought that had leaped into my mind. "Without my father's recognition of her—by sheer blind chance—in that marketplace on his way to embark for Italia, there would have been no tale! My father believed until that point he had merely been dreaming, and there is no sin or guilt in dreams. He would have thought no more of his dreams, and the cause of your father's attack upon him while he slept would have remained a mystery, unfortunate and inexplicable. Only that single sight of the woman, by mischance, changed everything for ever. And had that not occurred, your life would not have changed."
"What...what do you mean?" His expression now was one of uncertainty, triggered perhaps by the arrangement of my words. I held up my hand in an appeal for time to complete what I was thinking, for I was using words now that had not occurred to me before this moment.
"We will never know the exact truth of what your mother thought, or what motivated her to act as she did," I said. "But consider this, if you will.... " My thoughts were outstripping my abilities to voice them. "Suppose...just let us suppose, ludicrous though the thought might seem at this moment, that your mother had a deep and genuine love for the old man. He had no son. Is that not so? Only a single daughter in her teens. You were his only son?" He nodded, his face twisted in perplexity. "Then let us suppose also that his age made it impossible for him to father a son. Not to attempt the feat, you understand, but to achieve it. For all we know, he and his wife could have been trying for years. Will you agree to that?"
He nodded, yet I could see he was baffled and still angry. I rushed on with my thought before he could speak. "Now, consider this. A virile, healthy soldier of noble birth, dreadfully wounded in the neck and face but otherwise complete and whole, comes to live in their house. This man is in constant pain from his injuries and his face is heavily bandaged. For much of the time, he is effectively blind, deaf and mute, and is heavily drugged against his pain at all times. He never sees, and seems unaware of, anyone in the household, but is under constant surveillance by physicians, the household staff, the daughter of the house—we know that because my father spoke of her—and therefore, it would seem probable, also by the mistress of the house.
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"Now suppose again that somehow, perhaps by overhearing the physicians speaking among themselves about their charge, she learns that the soldier is sexually healthy, purging himself of seed in dreams at night as strong men will in celibacy. Might she not see that, somehow, as a cause for regret, a waste? I mean this seriously, Ambrose, and who can ever tell what thoughts go through the mind of another? And might she not then think of it for long weeks, during which the soldier's strength increased although his wounds did not improve...and might she not devise, in her love, or in her desperation, a means of using—borrowing, one might say—the natural, outflowing strength of one man, all unknown to him since he is drugged at all times, to benefit the flagging strength of another whom she loves?"
Now he did interrupt me. "Wait! Are you implying that my mother might have done what she did out of love for my father?"
I nodded my head. "Yes, I am."
"That is obscene! I've never heard the like—"
"No more have I, but it makes as much sense as the other! Think about it, man! This was no ordinary lust. There was nothing personal in what my father dreamed. It was a vision remembered, nothing more! The hazy recollection of a nocturnal image. To believe your mother capable of such mechanical impersonality, such mindless, self-destructive and aggressive lust, would be to brand her truly monstrous, and I doubt that she was anything like that."
"This is insane! I've heard enough. Thank you for your attempt to salvage my mother's worthlessness, although I know not what you hoped to achieve."
