by Jack Whyte
I could not simply leave him there as I had found him. He was Popilius Cirro, one of the last of my father's most trusted friends, and he deserved some show of care from me. Forcing myself to stifle my restlessness and the urging that prompted me to rush on callously in my pursuit of Uther, I fed him from my own supplies and spent some time changing the dressings on his wounds, using strips torn from a spare, clean tunic from my saddle bags. That done, I found some water on a nearby wagon, probably the one he had occupied, and washed him as well as I could, before helping him to move and arranging him as comfortably as possible on a grassy knoll.
I had done as much as I could for him, and it was time for me to move on. I told him so, and he nodded, accepting that, but then he asked me about regaining my memory and we talked for some time of that, and how it had affected me. I told him also about finding young Bassus, and how I had had to kill him. He listened in silence, fingering the stubble on his chin. When I had finished he sighed.
"I'd give anything in this world, Commander, to undo the last three years; to be back in Camulod, with your father alive and the world unfolding peacefully about us. But of course, that's nonsense—women's wishes. You'd best be on your way, if you're to find Uther, though I don't know what you'll be able to do to change anything."
I had nodded and risen to my feet, prepared to leave, when something in his voice, in the tone of it, alerted me. I could not identify what I had heard, but for some reason it made me think of what Quinto had said about Lot's women. I stopped and cleared my throat, looking down at him. "Tell me about the women, Popilius, about Lot's queen. What's going on? How did Uther capture her?"
He, too, cleared his throat, but he looked away, avoiding my eyes. "The Lady Ygraine."
"Sweet Jesus!" As he uttered it, the name flashed across my mind like Publius Varrus's Skystone blazing across the sky. Ygraine! The daughter of the Erse king who was Donuil's father! I remembered Donuil telling me the first time we met that his father and Lot were to be allied by marriage. His sister Ygraine had been betrothed to Lot mere months before. But that meant—and this thought was crushingly, overwhelmingly new to me—that she was also Deirdre's sister... my Cassandra's sister... The bitter, tragic irony of it almost buckled my knees, and I had to turn my back and walk away from Popilius to master my thoughts before he read the despair in my eyes.
My mind was screaming at me. Uther could have no idea, of course, who Ygraine truly was. He had killed her sister, bringing me after him, ravening for vengeance, and now when I found him he would be with yet another of this strange Erse family to which, it seemed, I was inextricably bound. I had a flashing image of Cassandra biting down on his swollen manhood and I felt my sanity withdrawing from me like a whirling wind. I pushed my fist, hard, into my mouth and bit down on my own knuckles. The sudden pain enabled me to regain control of my thoughts and force myself to remain rational. When I thought I had myself under control again I turned back to Popilius, clutching my bitten knuckles in my other hand. He was staring at me, wide-eyed, obviously wondering what my next reaction might be. I made myself walk back to him, and when I spoke, my voice sounded calm and reasonable even to me.
"When did this happen? What has happened? Tell me now, and leave nothing out."
One moment longer he hesitated, and then he began to speak in a flat, rough monotone. Much of what he would tell me, he was careful to point out at the start, was conjecture, but it was based solidly upon his own observations and upon comments made—or tactfully omitted—by other officers who were closer to the source of the truth than he was. In matters of fieldcraft, discipline, training, deployment and logistics, Uther consulted Popilius before committing himself or his forces to anything. Otherwise, Uther kept his own counsel and Popilius was normally content to have it that way. On this campaign, however, the veteran Popilius had been gravely troubled. His prime responsibility, as he saw it, was the defence and welfare of our Colony. If those twin priorities entailed a pre-emptive expedition into territories beyond our own, he would prosecute that campaign without question or pause, but his primary motivation was always to achieve the objective, deal with the threat and danger, and then withdraw homeward without delay. For more than a year now, he told me, that imperative had been neglected.
In the late summer of my first year of convalescence, Uther's advance party, with Uther himself in command, had surprised and captured a heavily escorted supply train on its way to the south coast, where the supplies were to be loaded onto ships and taken around by sea to Lot's stronghold on the northern coast of the long, Cornish peninsula. Among the personnel accompanying that train been a contingent of high-born ladies.
Uther, ever the dashing, dazzling heroic figure, had never warred on women and was at pains to point this out to his gentle prisoners. He had commiserated with them about the deaths of their escort and companions—the fortunes of war, over which he could have no control other than by ensuring victory for his own men. That done, and all courteously explained, he had entertained them lavishly as honoured guests for three days, during which his army had consolidated their own security and spirited the stolen spoils of the supply train into their own safe custody. Then, when he was sure that their reports could do nothing to hinder either his progress or his safety, he had released the women, sending them southward to their original destination under heavy guard.
No time had been lost on that occasion, Popilius assured me. Little had been risked, and a valuable prize had been gained. It was only months later that Popilius had begun to suspect that Uther himself had gained a valuable prize that day, quite apart from the captured supplies. Prior to that, Popilius had neither known nor cared about the identities of the women. He had found out only by accident one night, around the campfire with some of Uther's young staff officers who had drunk a little too much wine, that one of the women—the loveliest, of course—had been Lot's queen, Ygraine.
His soldier's mind had been outraged by this information, for here had been a legitimate spoil of war, a hostage and a bargaining tool of great power. Why, then, had Uther, who must have been well aware of who she was and what she would have been worth in the war against her husband, allowed the woman to go free? As I listened to his recounting of his misgivings, I was wondering the same thing myself. She was Lot's queen. She should never have been released!
Had she been anyone else, however, no matter who, Popilius's report would neither have bothered nor surprised me. I would have expected nothing less from my charming and mercurial cousin. But why in God's name would he have released Ygraine the queen? It made no sense at all, even had he been besotted by her, for merely by holding her prisoner he could have pursued his own designs and seduced her at his leisure, and with pleasure, knowing whose wife she was. And then it did make sense, in a bizarre, illogical way over which I had no control. The answer sprang into my mind completely formed and I accepted it immediately and instinctively as being true.
All that I knew of Lot, although I had not set eyes on him since that one time in boyhood, indicated that he was in many ways abnormal, almost inhuman, in his tastes and desires. Not that I had any cause to suspect him of being deviate or homosexual; far from it, his heterosexual lusts were notorious, as was his cruelty. It simply came to me that the man must be incapable of love—ordinary, human love—and it followed inevitably that his wife, as a bargaining piece in enemy hands, would have been less than useless to that enemy.
As a spy, however, angry in her Celtic pride and her sense of betrayal and abandonment by the man to whom she had been given like a sacrificial cow, she could be recruited to the cause of his enemies, would become an invaluable asset to them, even if her regal husband never shared a thought with her. From the way my heart swelled with excitement, I knew I was right. Ygraine was Uther's spy, the one of whom I had already heard! She and Uther had met, had quickly become enamoured of each other, and had conspired somehow, in the brief space of three short days, to undo Lot.
In the moments it took f
or all of this to explode in my mind, Popilius had continued speaking. Nothing had come of the events surrounding the supply train incident, he said, and apart from his outrage and puzzlement over the release of the woman, the whole thing had faded from his mind until about a year after the original encounter. Popilius had been personally inspecting the guards around a night camp when an exhausted rider had come in—a stranger wearing the blazon of the boar of Cornwall, Lot's own emblem— bearing urgent word for Uther.
Within the hour, Uther had ridden out, accompanied by only two of his closest circle, leaving his army under the control of Popilius. Nothing untoward had occurred and Popilius had not been unduly concerned at first. Only when the second consecutive day of Uther's absence dawned had Popilius begun to grow concerned. His concern mushroomed when he made specific inquiries and discovered that no one, including the remaining members of Uther's inner circle, knew where the king had gone. Even his Celts had no idea of Uther's whereabouts, but they at least were unconcerned. To them, their king was inviolable and invincible. He would come back safely.
As it transpired, Popilius had been forced to sit in agonized inactivity for two more days before Uther returned late in the afternoon, just before nightfall, galloping into camp as though he had not a care in the world. He had called a meeting of his senior officers immediately, and told them they would be moving out at dawn. Few slept for more than an hour that night, because long before dawn began to lighten the sky the camp had been broken down and stowed, and the troops were in formation, ready to ride out. They had marched for a day and a half, and then prepared an elaborate ambush above a narrow, mile-long gorge, where the only road ran narrow and serpentine alongside a fast-flowing stream. Every trooper had been turned to work lining the lip of the gorge with massive boulders, assembling an avalanche of rocks that would decimate the forces caught below. Uther's bowmen, in the meantime, were busy digging themselves in on the peat-covered hillsides on the exit side of the gorge, where the emerging road turned left to pass along the bottom of a gentle slope.
In the fight that ensued, Popilius experienced for the first time the destructive power of massed Celtic longbows as used by Uther's people. He had fought several times with contingents of Celts using the bows, but nothing he had ever seen had prepared him for what transpired that day. They had dug themselves four pairs of trenches ascending the hillside, and there were fifty men in each trench. Now, responding to voice signals from a leader in each trench, they began to fire in volleys; fifty long, lethal, deadly accurate arrows aimed and launched at a time from either side of the slope, and each flight followed so quickly by another that each rank had barely time to re-nock and pull before its time came round again. It looked, Popilius whispered, as though it were raining arrows.
Each man, he told me, fired ten arrows into a dense- packed target area that was so close it was impossible to miss. Four thousand arrows aimed at fewer than one thousand close-packed men who had nowhere to run in search of cover. It was over in almost less time than it takes to describe. Not one cavalryman went forward to meet an enemy that morning.
When Popilius had finished speaking, I allowed his silence to hang in the air for long moments before I broke it. "Where did Uther's information come from?"
"You tell me."
"Ygraine."
"That's my guess, too." He sighed deeply. "But it's still only a guess, Commander."
"No, it had to be Ygraine. There's no other explanation."
Popilius nodded. "I agree. That first messenger who came that night I was inspecting the guards, the one who wore Lot's boar...he was her man, sent to fetch Uther. I have seen him since, and he was with her when she joined us four days ago."
"She came willingly?"
He grunted. "Aye, and quickly. She had a child with her, too, new born. Lot thinks it's his, apparently, so she must have lain with him at least once in the past year."
"Is it?"
Again came the shake of his white head and a grunt of discomfort as he sought to ease his position. "Your guess is as good as mine. But Uther walks with an extra spring in his step nowadays, it seems to me."
I scrubbed my face with my hands, as though to wash away the need for sleep, although what I was trying to dislodge was a growing need to scream out my outrage. "You've given me much to think about, old friend," I told Popilius, fighting to keep my voice level. "I feel I've slept away two important years and I've much to do to catch up with all that has happened."
He smiled, a brief, wintry grin. "Well, at least you're back, Commander. 'Thank God,' is all I can say. What will you do now?"
"Find Uther immediately. In the meantime, you have your duty to attend to, and it consists of recovering and returning safe to Camulod. We need you, Popilius Cirro. Try to sleep for an hour or so and then send someone to report your presence to Mucius Quinto over on the far side of the field. No point in doing it now, your wounds are dressed and he's too busy to attend to you. As quickly as you can thereafter, get you home again, and don't let Quinto stop until you get there. I have to leave now, but I'll see you back in Camulod."
He grunted again and nodded, looking at me with fondness. "Watch yourself, Commander. Be careful. There's whole armies of dangerous people out there."
I grinned at him. "Didn't anyone ever tell you how dangerous Caius Merlyn Britannicus can be?" I clapped him on the shoulder. "Sleep a while, old friend. Then make enough noise to draw yourself to the attention of our surgeon. Farewell."
XL
The following day, I found Gulrhys Lot, King of Cornwall, hanging from a tree, his hands and feet severed at the wrists and ankles and stuffed into a bag that was tied around his waist. The bag was made of gold brocade and bore the embroidered crimson emblem of Pendragon. The ring finger of his severed right hand still bore his signet: a massive golden ring set with the black boar of Cornwall and proof that the monster was dead.
Ignoring the mystery of my find, I cut the body down and burned it, but I kept the golden signet. I never discovered the truth of how Lot came to die, hanged ignominiously and left to dangle alone and unmourned in a forest glade, his royal seal intact upon his finger in a bag of meat.
I slept that night within a mile of where his ashes smouldered. The smell of his burning was in my clothes and in my hair, and I dreamed dreadful dreams. Sections of armies, bands of fighting men, mounted and afoot, swept and swirled around me in awful silence, though their mouths were wide with screams and their faces harrowed with agony. I saw Lot of Cornwall, mounted on a silver horse, being hit and borne down into a press of bodies, which scattered suddenly to show me Uther, naked and bloodied, his manhood erect with lust, holding Lot's severed, dripping head above his own and laughing in dementia, weeping blood-red tears while I ran towards him, a dagger in my hand, my eyes fixed on the bloodied flail that dangled from his wrist. And suddenly the severed head above Uther was Deirdre's—my Cassandra's—and it was screaming at me, wide-eyed and wide-mouthed, to stay away, to beware, beware, beware; and then came a clanging, echoing blow to my head, a stabbing, crushing pain in my back beneath my ribs and a hideous tearing wrench that started me awake in terror, my heart thudding in my chest. It was morning and the sun was already high.
I lay awake for a long time, unmoving, my mind reeling with the reality of my terror and the unreality of my dream. My back ached agonizingly, just where the dream-blow had struck me, and I knew I had slept upon a surfaced root. Presently, when my heart had slowed down and my breathing returned to normal, I rolled away from it and sat up, rubbing my aching spine. As I rose painfully to my feet, I "looked ruefully for the cause of my discomfort, ashamed of myself for having made a boy's mistake in lying down in such a spot. But there was nothing there. The turf on which I had lain was thick and springy. I knelt again and dug in the grass with my fingertips, clearly seeing the imprint of my body. There was nothing: no root, no stone, no projection of any kind. The mossy turf was smooth and soft and yielding. I stood up hastily, aware of a stirring of s
uperstitious fear, and set about saddling my spare mount, leaving the big black unburdened.
I ate as I travelled, on horseback, chewing dried nuts and chopped, dried apples mixed with roasted grain, and as I progressed the pain in my body receded palpably, drawing back slowly from a point beneath my ribs in front, until it seemed to exit from its starting point low in my back. Within an hour of leaving my campsite, it had vanished completely.
Sometime later, when I dismounted to drink from a swift-flowing stream, I saw my own reflection in a sheltered eddy beneath the bank. The sun was high behind me as I stooped to the surface of the water, its light diffused through my long, yellow hair, and I thought again, with a chill of horror, of Deirdre's severed head in my dream. Uther had held it by the hair, but the hair had been red-gold, and Deirdre's eyes had not been hers but the bright green eyes of someone else. Not Deirdre of the Violet Eyes, for green was never violet, and as Donuil had told me, her hair in girlhood had been deep red, the red of day-old chestnuts, not the golden hue I had seen in my dream. When I knew her, as Cassandra, she had been fair-haired and grey-eyed. This was the stuff of dreams, but the hairs along my spine stiffened in awe. I scooped up some water quickly and was about to drink when something struck me as wrong. I looked more closely, and saw the discoloration. It looked muddy. Silt in the water, I told myself, but I had seen such mud before, too many times.
Less than twenty paces upstream, I found five of my own men of Camulod starting to bloat in the stream bed. I vomited up the thought of what I had almost drunk, and when I had recovered, I went in and pulled them out, laying them side by side along the bank. I knew all five of them and it was all I could do for them.
Throughout the remainder of that morning, I became inured to the sight of my own men lying dead. They had taken many of the enemy with them, but I ignored those completely, my eyes attracted only to the colours of Camulod and the red dragon of Pendragon. My route lay directly to the south, to the sea, and I knew I would wade through the debris of a running fight for the entire journey. I met five living men of Uther's force, all wounded badly; none able to tell me anything coherent. I left each of them with food and drink and moved on. I also found eight of Lot's men alive, five of them dying. The other three tried to unhorse me all at once, but I had seen the one crouched in the tree above me and was forewarned. I killed him as he leaped at me, catching him on my sword point and thrusting him away and down so that he almost tore the weapon from my grasp. One of the others seized me by the ankle, but my horse turned on him, striking him with its shoulder, and he fell away as I slashed at him, catching him high on the side of the head. The third man fled and I did not have the heart to follow him.
