by Jack Whyte
"By God, I hope it is!"
Lars cleared his throat loudly, drawing my eyes to him. He had decided it was time to change the subject. I watched him now looking at my clothing, noting the style of it. "You're Roman, you say? Forgive me if you think I'm being inquisitive, but Merlyn sounds like no Roman name I've ever come across."
I felt a smile tugging at my lips in the face of his obvious desire to lead our conversation into quieter paths. "That's true. I am half Celt, and Merlyn marks me, but my name is Britannicus—Caius Merlyn Britannicus."
"Britannicus?" His expression quickened. "Are you from up Aquae Sulis way?"
"Close by. About thirty-five miles south-west of there. Why?"
"It's an unusual name. A friend of my father's had a friend from Aquae Sulis called Britannicus, a long time ago. He went to live there. Name of Varrus. He was a smith, walked with a limp. Why are you smiling?"
My smile had become a huge grin and I leaned towards him now, across the table. "Because I can hardly credit what I'm hearing. Varrus! The friend you speak of was my grandfather, Caius Britannicus. Publius Varrus married his sister, my great-aunt Luceiia."
"Get away! Well I'm damned!" He was staring at me, wide-eyed. "Did you ever know his friend Equus? That was my father."
I could hardly contain my astonishment and delight. "Equus was your father? I knew him well, when I was a small boy. He lived with us. But why don't I know you? I've known your brothers from my infancy."
"Joseph and Carol. Well I'm damned!" He reached across the table and picked up the wine jug to give himself time to absorb what he was hearing, pouring another cup for all of us. "You knew Joseph and Carol? I was the eldest. Ran away and joined the legions when I was just a younker living in Colchester. Didn't want to waste my life in a dirty old smithy. Wasted it in the dirty old army, instead. Got back years later to find they'd all moved away to the west somewhere. So you knew Joseph and Carol? Well I'm damned."
"Knew? Lars, I still know them! They're in Camulod, our colony. They operate our smithies nowadays."
He looked at me strangely and I sensed a sudden stillness in the others who had been hanging on our every word. "Camulod? Uther Pendragon's place? They live there? You live there?"
I was taken aback. His tone said quite clearly, unmistakably, that he had thought only monsters and outlaws lived in Camulod.
"Well, yes, they live there, and so do I, but I would hardly call it 'Uther Pendragon's place.' Uther lives there, part of the time, and commands our forces for the time being, in the war against Lot of Cornwall, but his kingdom—his 'place' as you call it—is in the mountains of Cambria, several days' ride to the north-west. Believe me, Camulod is far from being Uther Pendragon's place, or anyone else's. It's a thriving community, held and maintained by its colonists. You've obviously never been there."
He made a derisive sound in his throat and shook his head in a brief, abrupt negative. I frowned, unable to believe what I was hearing.
"Why not?" I continued. "It's not that far from here, no more than fifty miles." I was even more disconcerted now to see hostility and fear in his face and I glanced at the others, to see it mirrored in theirs. I rushed on, eager to find the source of it. "Good God, Lars, you all look as though you're afraid of the place and all it contains! Why? Your two brothers are there, and I live there, and it was founded and built by people like your own father and his friends. Why should anyone—and you of all people—be afraid of the very name of it?" It was evident that he was not going to answer me, and I had a sudden revelation. "Or is it Uther Pendragon you fear?"
His face darkened, rigid with hostility at the very mention of Uther's name, and I knew I was correct. "Why, Lars?" I was insistent. "Why should you fear Uther Pendragon? Tell me."
He cleared his throat. "Ask Eric. And Brunna."
I turned to them, to include them in what had suddenly become a very personal matter.
An hour later, I had heard more than I ever sought to hear. Lars and his wife Brunna, and their extensive family in and around Isca and the surrounding villages and hamlets, were the ordinary people of this region. In their minds "there was no difference between Uther of Camulod—how that name galled me!—and Lot of Cornwall. They thought of both men as demons incarnate. The armies of both had ravaged this entire countryside over the past three years, looting and killing and raping as they pleased. The local people had far less fear of Saxons than they had of their own kind.
Lars told me he had returned from his service with the legions almost twenty years earlier and had met and wed Brunna shortly after that. He had fought with Magnus Maximus, and then with Stilicho's legions after Magnus was killed. When the Emperor Honorius killed Stilicho, his own deputy and former Regent, Lars deserted and made for home, and the journey as a fugitive, ending finally in the quiet backwater of Isca, had taken him three years. Brunna's family had been merchants of some stature in Isca, and her father had set them up fifteen years ago in this hostelry. They had prospered for twelve years, until Lot of Cornwall decided to extend his territories by conquest.
The previous year, while I had been relearning how to live, both of their sons, aged fourteen and twelve, had been taken in a sweep by Uther's soldiers and hanged out of hand along with twenty other men suspected of giving aid and sustenance to the enemy. Two months after that, at harvest time, Brunna's youngest sister, a fifteen-year-old girl, had been ravished and killed, with three of her friends, by a party of Lot's people. The father and brother of the girl whose home they had been visiting were butchered while attempting to protect the girls.
The picture these simple people drew for me was clear. The "enemy," in their eyes, was anyone who was armed and rode a horse or marched carrying weapons. Uther Pendragon and Gulrhys Lot were monsters, and any trees beneath which they rode were likely to bear dangling, human fruit. Their very names carried with them the stench of rotting flesh and burning homesteads, and evoked chaos, screams of despair, and long, starving winters.
Their story drove the wine-fed euphoria from my head and I slept heavily that night. The following morning, I was on the road again, driving my horses hard along the road to and beyond Isca to the south-west. Lars and all his family would make their way as quickly as they could now to Camulod, bearing a letter from me to my aunt that would place them under my official protection. In the meantime, I rode hard, with my gaze focused on the road ahead of me, and on the confrontation with my cousin that lay at the end of it. I rode seething with a fury so great that it had almost displaced my personal grudge against Uther. To hear the name of Camulod spoken in fear and loathing had outraged all within me and made me rage at my own former, self- inflicted blindness. We had heard tales in Camulod of atrocities and vicious acts of terror being committed by our own, but had discounted them, choosing, in what I could now identify with ease as smug complacency, to attribute such tales to the lies and rumour-mongering of Lot and his creatures—fictitious calumnies concocted for the purpose of turning the people of our own lands against us. Now, shaken by the revelations of the previous night, I saw the Dream of Caius Britannicus and Publius Varrus reduced to smoking cinders in the terror of the people of this land around me. Where had the vision of my people gone? What had happened to their ideals of freedom and justice and dignity and worth; of free men, living and working in freedom, having the right to bear arms to protect that freedom against all usurpation, even by their own kind? I cursed the fate that had left me senseless of what was happening around me for two crucial years, and spurred my mount harder.
And as I rode further and further west after leaving the great road, I began to see signs of depredation all around me: burned farmsteads; charred and shattered houses; dangling, withered corpses in the trees; meadows strewn with the skeletal remains of soldiers and horses. And no people. None at all. The land lay empty and devastated, and my anger grew, feeding upon itself.
And then, on a morning bright with sun and the song of larks, I breasted a hill and found fresh corpses
sprawled in the autumn grass in my path. I reined in immediately, scanning ahead for possible danger, but whatever peril there might have been earlier had moved on.
Satisfied that the dead and I were alone, I dismounted and went to examine them more closely. They were strangers all, but very newly dead, their flesh still warm, their blood yet liquid, and I left them where they lay.
A short time later, seen only by a pair of eagles circling high above, I stopped by the side of a small, swift-running freshet, stripped and bathed, shivering with the cold, and then allowed the sun's warmth to dry me. I pulled on a fresh, light, clean tunic, then unpacked and shrugged into the ring armour I had adapted from the Saxon devices of the same kind. Mine was designed for a horseman—a heavy coat with a wide-skirted tail ample enough to spread when I was mounted to cover my own and my horse's haunches, and long, loose-legged trousers. The suit was made from well-worked, supple, black-dyed leather and covered with many thousands of tiny, overlapping rings of iron, brass and copper wire that would stop a hard-swung sword, a thrown spear, or an arrow fired from any but a long, Celtic bow. It covered me from neck to ankle and, while it was cumbersome to wear afoot, it served its purpose magnificently when I was mounted.
When I was fully armoured, my long surcoat securely buckled down the side, I repacked and restowed all my gear, then donned my great black cloak with its emblazoned silver bear. I still wore my silvered Roman helmet with its black plume and full cheek-plates—I had not yet been able to improve on that design—and now I strung the great, horned African bow of Publius Varrus and slung it across my shoulders with a full quiver of long arrows. The black war cloak was heavy on such a hot day—it drew the heat of the sun into itself immediately—but I wanted Uther to know who was coming long before I reached him; and the discomfort involved in wearing it was unimportant. By my right knee, slung through three rings attached to a long, flat piece of toughened leather hide, hung my cross-hilted cavalry sword. On the other side, the hook attached to hold my iron flail glittered, unused. I dug in my spurs and my big black surged forward, leading its consorts.
I had crossed the highest ground in Cornwall, it appeared, for from that point onward the land fell away beneath me, each successive hilltop lower than the one that had preceded it, until eventually I approached the sea coast, seeing from afar the sunlight glittering on the sparkling surface of the waters that stretched beyond the horizon. There, in the valley bottom beneath the last upsurge of coastal hillside, I found the massive track of a passing army, coming from the highlands to my right and proceeding westward, along the coastline. The debris they had left behind lay scattered everywhere and the scene of their passing was a broad riverbed of bruised and flattened grass the width of the valley bottom, winding away from sight to disappear into the south-eastern hills. They had passed by perhaps the day before, no more than that. The grass, I knew, would show little sign of their passing by this time tomorrow.
Without pausing, I put the spurs to the black's flank, heading downhill and cross-slope to find and follow the broad swath. My way was clearly marked and my apprehension grew with every mile. I found the first corpses within four miles of joining the wide track. There had been a skirmish, probably a rearguard action, and Uther's people had not been victorious. All of the dead wore Uther's red dragon blazon, and there was a heap of them, some twenty in number, who lay piled together without weapons. They had been wounded earlier, dragged together, and killed out of hand. All their throats were cut.
From that point onward, I was seldom out of sight of death in one form or another. Several of the bodies I found wore the black boar of Cornwall, but the great majority wore the red Pendragon mark, and too many wore the armour of Camulod. I stopped counting when I had reached several hundred. After that, I simply rode and looked, goading my horses to move more and more quickly through a landscape littered with slain men who had died fighting, and hanged men who had not, and butchered men who had been bound and then casually slaughtered, and among and around all of them were the carrion crows and other loathsome creatures that far outnumbered their silent hosts and feasted on the fruits of men's hatred of one another.
And then I found a living man, who caught my eye by moving. He was above me on a steep hillside, and I pulled my horse up sharply, dropping the reins and whipping my bow into readiness and taking aim before I realized he wore my own uniform: the black and silver Roman-styled armour of Caius Merlyn Britannicus of Camulod. I lowered my weapon and started up the hillside towards him as he began to walk downhill, lurching and staggering. When less than thirty paces separated us, he fell forward onto his face and rolled down almost beneath my horse's feet. Even as he fell I recognized the face beneath the crusted blood that obscured it. It was young Marcus Bassus, one of my most promising junior commanders and the fourth consecutive member of his family to serve loyally in the forces of our Colony.
I was off my horse before Bassus stopped rolling down the hillside, and I cradled him as gently as I could while I looked around for some spot where I could lodge him without further danger. I thought at first he was already dead, but he was only deeply unconscious and I took advantage of that to drag him across the slope to a spot that was grassy and almost flat. There I undid his breastplate, cutting the blood-slick leather straps, and examined his wounds, seeing at once that he was far, far gone. An arrow had pierced deeply beneath his armpit, striking downward from behind and freakishly finding a path between his ribs and deep into his chest. He must have had his arm extended above his head when he was shot. The arrow had broken off at some time—I could not remember having seen it as he approached me—and only a broken stub, less than the length of my thumb, projected from the wound, greasy with partially congealed blood and crusted with dirt. The jagged end of it had torn the inside of his arm, ripping the muscles there and leaving a gristly mess. I had time to bathe his face and pad the inside of his arm against the splintered arrow- stem with a piece of cloth before his eyelids fluttered open.
He knew me, and he was in control of his senses, and in the quarter-hour before I left him there he told me, speaking in a thin, pain-filled voice and breathing in fast, agonizing but shallow gasps, something of what had happened in the previous few days.
Uther, he said, had blundered badly, miscalculating several elements like a man under a curse. He had a spy within Lot's camp, it appeared, who had provided him with a detailed report convincing him that Lot's main force had been committed in the south-east, prior to Uther's arrival in the west, against the incursion of a large Saxon army. Lot had as usual, the story went, sent his army off without him, and had immured himself to await reinforcements in one of his northern strongholds. Once told of this, and believing his source implicitly, Uther had determined to march northward quickly to the coast, there finally to bring Lot to battle before his expected allies could arrive. Thus determined, Uther had refused to listen to the advice of his senior officers, basing everything on the gamble that Lot's main army was safely committed in the south-east against the Saxons and would await Lot's arrival. In the meantime, Uther believed he had the advantage of surprise, with Lot safely bottled up in a minor stronghold that would not be able to withstand a siege. He had ignored the misgivings of his advisers, who had urged him to protect his back against attack from the north-west where, according to other rumours they had heard, a new army of Hibernian Scots mercenaries, the ferocious warriors who were becoming known as galloglas, was on its way to join Lot's summer war.
Uther had chosen to believe otherwise. If the galloglas came, he said, they would come by sea, to anchor at the closest point to Lot's stronghold. Should that come to pass before his business with Lot was complete, he believed he could withhold their advance from the coast by using his bowmen to decimate the Ersemen as they attempted to scale the Cornish cliffs.
What he could not have known, however, was the degree of error in his expectations. He had invested Lot's ditched and dyked stronghold according to plan, but even before his engineer
s could start constructing their siege engines, word had come with the dawn from his unknown spy that the southern army was returning, having failed to bring the Saxons to battle.
That word was followed within hours by a belated warning that a fleet had landed to the north two days earlier, spilling an army that was short of food and was now thrusting southward to join Lot, replenishing its larders as it came. And then, early that same afternoon, another fleet of more than a hundred galleys had come into view from the north-west, converging on the single stretch of beach, not far from Uther's camp, that was not begirt by towering cliffs.
In the space of a few short hours, although through no real fault of his own, Uther had been outnumbered and outmanoeuvred. Immediately upon sighting the relieving fleet, he had summoned his bowmen back from the cliffs and called an immediate council of war, drawing up quick plans to strike south and surprise Lot's main army on the road along the coast, leaving Cornwall's deplorable king safe for the moment in the hands of his rescuers.
They had struck out for the south immediately, and Bassus had drawn the honour of commanding the rearguard. It was one of his own scouts, ranging far behind to spy on the enemy's progress, who had brought Bassus the news of the final blow to Uther's plans. This man, at great risk to himself, had approached Lot's stronghold again and remained hidden among the rocks on the hillside far above, to watch what might develop in the aftermath of Uther's departure. He had seen Lot ride to meet his new reinforcements from the sea, to join them and make off around the coast southward at great speed, the massive Erse galleys surging along under full oar power and sails spread to a following wind, forewarned and fully aware of Uther's strength and his line of march.
