by Jack Whyte
"Well, let me think . . . I saw another small boy crying close by here last week some time. Are you sure you wouldn't like me to try to recall what I thought then, too? I've seen a lot of small boys crying over the years."
Uther nodded, his face serious. "I believe you. But what did you think of me that day?"
"Well, it might be easier if I start slowly, remembering what I saw before I get to what I might have thought." He paused, frowning deeply and staring into nothingness, and Uther waited, intent on his answer. "I think . . . I think I remember being absolutely astounded to see a small, grubby boy with a squished-up, dirty face encrusted with snot and large, bleeding cuts and bruises on his skinny little shins. I looked at him, and now I remember thinking, What an ugly, ill-featured, misshapen little brat! And that was but my first thought . . . Are you sure you want to hear more?"
Finally Uther broke into a grin. "No," he said, "I want to hear no more of that rubbish."
"Very well, then." Garreth Whistler nodded his head with finality. "You tell me why you want to know, and I'll tell you."
Uther looked away, unwilling to meet Garreth's eyes. "I . . . I don't really know why I want to know."
"No, of course you don't. . . not any more than you know why you would expect me to believe such an obvious lie. Well, when you do know, come back, and I'll think about telling you."
The boy threw up his hands. "Very well, I'll tell you." He paused to collect his thoughts. "I was . . . I was feeling lonely, I suppose, and sorry for myself. I've been feeling that way quite a lot recently. And I suppose, too, that made me think of that day you found me, which had been among the very worst days of my life until then. I could remember how I felt, and I could guess how I must have looked to you, the King's Champion, and so I wondered what you could possibly have thought to make you behave towards me as you did."
Garreth Whistler shrugged his broad shoulders, then picked up the rusty breastplate again, although he made no move to start work on it. "Have you considered the obvious answer to that?" he asked. I was the King's Champion, as you say, and you were the King's small grandson. Perhaps I saw immediately that I could do myself some good in my patron's eyes by doing some small good for you."
"No," Uther replied. "I don't believe that. Do you want to know what I think? I think you simply chose to help me because you wanted to. What I am curious about is why you would have wanted to."
Garreth dropped the cuirass to the ground again and stood up quickly, inhaling deeply through his nostrils and placing his hands on his hips as he gazed off, head high, into the distance, his broad back to Uther. The boy said nothing, having learned long since to wait until Garreth was prepared to end a silence on his own, and eventually the tall, golden warrior turned back to face him.
"Do you recall my telling you that I am an Outlander?"
"Aye."
"And did I mention that I was orphaned twice, once at my birth and then again when my adopted father, Dunvallo, died?"
"Aye, you did."
"Well, I was eight, not quite nine, when that happened, and I was left to fend for myself. I did it successfully, too. But I know now that I could not have done it without the goodwill of the villagers. It was they who sustained me and kept me fed . . .
"Not all the villagers were supportive of me, though, and their sons were definitely not. I was an Outlander, and I looked different from anyone else, and that meant I was fair game for anyone who cared to hunt me. And they hunted me, Uther. Not a day went by without my being thrashed by someone, and usually it was a group of someones. But that is where, and how, I first learned to fight. I was fortunate in being tall and strong for my age, but that only brought me into conflict with bigger boys, who would not have bothered with me had they not been provoked by my size, my height. And then I was befriended by a man who saw something in me that no one else had seen. He took me into his household and placed me under his own protection, and my days of being persecuted were at an end. Can you guess who he was?"
"My father, Uric?"
Garreth smiled. "No, for he himself was barely beyond boyhood then. It was your grandfather, King Ullic, and I have been grateful to him ever since." His smile died away. "Thanks to his good regard, I was able to train properly and become the warrior I am today, and my duty is total loyalty to the king. But I never forgot how it felt to be as unloved as I felt before your grandfather found me. I never forgot the misery of being hated and abused for no good reason. I never forgot the pain of being rejected or the other pain, far worse, of being scorned and ridiculed. So when I saw you there that day, hiding in the byre, it seemed but natural to do the things I did and to offer you some comfort and understanding, because believe me, Uther, I knew exactly what you were feeling and thinking. So how can you ever repay me for such kindness? Well, you'll know when the opportunity comes along, and when it does, you won't have to tell me what you did, because I will know. Now, you tell me . . . why have you been feeling so low for the past week?"
Uther shook his head. He wanted to confess his feelings to Garreth about Camulod and Cambria and his disloyalty, but the time was not right, not yet, and so he shrugged away from any satisfying explanation and felt yet more guilt for knowing that Garreth knew he was being evasive.
Chapter THREE
Nemo did not often feel the need for solitude, for she never thought very deeply about anything. She had never felt a need to avoid the company of others in order to debate within herself on anything, and she had no training of any kind in structured logic or formal analysis.
On those very few occasions when she did have things to think about, however, Nemo had discovered a place where she could go to be alone and undisturbed. She thought of it as the Place of the Bows," a name given to it by her alone and known to no one else. It bothered her not at all that it was one of the most sacred places in all of Pendragon Cambria, access to it forbidden to all but the King and the Druids. She had no interest in harming or changing or defacing anything there, no interest in the normal purposes
for which the place was used and no interest in making anyone aware that she might venture there from time to time. The Place of the Bows was Nemo's private spot, and she worked hard to ensure that no one ever saw her there or saw her approaching or leaving the area.
It had originally been a grove of three ancient oak trees, the only trio of such trees in a region that was generally too rocky to support anything other than hawthorns, scrub willows and stunted birch, which was why it was a hallowed spot, sacred to the Druids. But one of the venerable trees had been sundered by lightning ages earlier, and little remained of it now but a blackened, shrunken stump. A second tree had died much later of natural but undetermined causes, and most of that one remained in place, its mighty branches dried and cracked, stripped of all traces of bark and weathered by long, withering decades of rain and snow, frost and blistering sunshine. Only the third of the trio remained intact and alive, and its upper branches were choked with clumps of mistletoe so thick and luxuriant that they could conceal all signs of human presence were anyone to crouch up there among them. Nemo frequently did exactly that, having found a high crotch among the clumps where she could rest unseen and in great comfort, reclining on a couch of springy, strongly anchored mistletoe and looking down on the neighbouring area. And it was there that King Ullic's bowmen practised daily, all day long, firing their long, carefully fletched arrows at the targets they had made from bundles of tightly packed straw, bound together with leather thongs and draped with cloth coverings marked in concentric rings.
Between this practice area and the tree from which Nemo watched them, a stand of bushy young evergreens served as an extra screen, separating the practice area from the sacred grove. The saplings, she had discovered, were yew trees, and they were tended jealously by the Druids, watched over and carefully nurtured, trimmed and pruned. Each one of these young trees would some day grow to reach the size at which its limbs could be cut, then individually dried, shaped and carved
to form one of the mighty, man-high bows of which King Ullic's people were so proud. Pendragon longbows, they called them, and never had the world seen such weapons. An arrow fired from one of those bows, even at a distance of two hundred paces, could pierce a tree—or an armoured man—with ease, and transfix either, protruding front and rear. Nemo knew this was true; perched high up in her oak tree, she had seen the evidence with her own eyes.
Uther loved the Pendragon longbow; while he was in Cambria he spent hours each day practising with the huge weapon, and Nemo spent those same hours watching him. Nemo was not interested in the bows, however. She would rather have spent her time among the men and the horses of Camulod, the cavalry, as she had heard Uther name them. Those she could have watched all day and all night, too, for everything about them excited her: the size and sheer brute strength of the great animals and the beautiful leather-and-metal harness that they wore; the height and bearing of the riders; the splendour of the weapons they carried; and even the glittering armour they wore, burnished and blazing, blinding in the sunlight and twinkling with reflections in the light of the moon. But wherever Uther Pendragon went, Nemo followed. Uther was her single, all-consuming interest. She thought of him all time, believing, ever since she had first met him, that he was the biggest part of her destiny—the only person who had ever looked beyond her startling ugliness and seen a person worth tolerating hiding underneath.
Jonet the Toad, they had called her in the days before she met Uther, and she had answered to the name, believing it to be apt and no more than she deserved. Her raw, unleavened ugliness had always weighed upon her like a yoke carved from stone, blighting her with the guilt of her appearance. She had always been aware of it, always felt its presence, always acknowledged her duty to grovel to the world because of it.
One of the very first truths that she had been conscious of was that she was different, in some unknown but unpleasant way, from other children. Her earliest lessons, overwhelmingly repeated and reinforced, informed her that she was an unlovely and unlovable creature, unacceptable, unfit and undesirable. It never crossed her mind that those surrounding her in her first days were all male, since she had no mother and no female intimates, or that they were much older than she was. It never occurred to her to doubt them, or to question their views of her, or to challenge their dictates. They were her judges, her accusers and her condemners, and that was made obvious by the way they acted and by the fact that no one ever contradicted anything they said or did. Many of them were her half-brothers and many more were cousins of varying degrees of consanguinity, but all of them were united from the first in decrying and condemning her unique unloveliness.
It had been hammered home to her ever since she was old enough to walk and listen and understand that her appearance and her looks were offensive. The girls of her own age were all prettier than she, even the plainest of them, and they all liked to make themselves feel prettier by laughing and jeering at her lack of anything that might be called attractive.
So one of the first things she ever learned was that she must never cry, because whenever she did, whenever she allowed her tears to flow and to be seen, it brought her more grief and more trouble. She might be beaten or more cruelly used, or her tormentors might laugh at her and throw things at her, or they might take away from her whatever she was holding or clutching at the time. Once they had killed a wounded crow that she had found and nursed almost back to health. When they saw how deeply she grieved for the dead bird, they laughed and took note and waited for her to betray a fondness or a liking for some other creature, and then they killed that, too—a rabbit she had raised from babyhood, and then a goat she had been set to guard one summer's afternoon.
The boys, some of them her brothers, had beaten and abused her that day, tying her up and jeering at her as they killed the goat out of sheer, pleasurable malice, and after it was all over and they had all run away, the uncle who had set Jonet to the task beat her with a heavy stick for having lost his goat. It was plainly her fault the goat was dead, and everyone agreed. No point in seeking to place blame on any of the boys; no one expected anything better of them. But Jonet the Toad was neither boy nor girl. Jonet was simply there, available and unsightly, blameworthy by her very appearance.
After that day, Jonet had refused to be a victim any longer. Thereafter she had shown no kindness to anyone, shown no concern for any creature, nor had she ever permitted herself to weep openly again. By the time she was seven, she had not shed a tear for anyone to see for almost two whole years.
Of course, she wept sometimes, but only when she was alone. At such times, although she herself could not have said why the tears flowed from her, she wept for herself and for the creatures for whom she dared show no affection. She wept, unknowingly, out of loneliness and heartache, out of friendlessness and despair, and out of a cruel awareness of her own unsightliness and ugliness, but always she wept in the privacy of some deep nook she had created for herself, far from prying and unfriendly human eyes. She trusted no human being to deal with her without causing grief or pain.
Even her father had called her a foul toad and kicked her away from him one day when she had been beaten by one of her brothers and had vomited from a punch to her gut, fouling the front of her rough smock. So for a long time after that, Jonet had thought of herself as a real toad, a cold and slimy nasty thing beloved by no one, and she had examined herself carefully for similarities to the creature she believed she resembled.
She took note that her whole body was stocky and thick-set. Her limbs were short and burly, her legs bowed and muscular, and her arms, hands and fingers as stubby, thick and strong as any boy's. Her hair, too, was thick and coarse, wiry and ungovernable even when it was clean, which it seldom was. In fact, her body was compact and strong and dense with muscle, but she would have found no pleasure in those attributes, even had she been aware of them or paused to consider them. Compactness and strength were not what she required of her body, and those elements she longed for and would have given anything to have long legs and silky hair, blue eyes and white, even teeth—were simply not hers. Jonet was a toad.
And then one day she heard someone, some old woman in the village, say that toads had wondrously beautiful, liquid brown eyes—the most beautiful eyes in all the world of animals, and she grew excited with the hope that she might own something, one physical attribute, that others might admire and envy. But of course, she had to find some way of seeing her eyes for herself.
Jonet had never seen a mirror, but she knew that such things existed, and that you could see your entire face in one of them. In a village as poor as hers, however, no one was wealthy enough to own one. And even had there been several, the very thought of how people would ridicule and torture her if they even suspected her of wishing to look at her own face was enough to frighten her into immobility. And so she learned to be content to close her eyes and simply dream that she possessed the most beautiful eyes in the world.
Leir the Druid, the man who had fathered her, was one of the most powerful members of the Druid confraternity in southern Cambria, which meant that he spent much of his life conferring with his priestly colleagues, travelling between and among the various communities for which he held a shared responsibility. While doing that, of course, he spent little time in his own home—a fact that provided his daughter with one of the few pleasures in her bleak life.
One day he returned home from one of his long journeys, however, accompanied by a new wife, and Jonet chose to disappear for a while, as she often did, in the hope that her father's travels had merely been interrupted by this marriage and that he might still depart again, with or without his bride.
Even at the age of nine, Jonet was well aware that Leir's wives were generally short-lived. Her own mother, whose name had been Naomi, had apparently lasted little more than two years, dying quite suddenly shortly after Jonet was born and leaving the baby to be cared for by an adolescent servant girl called Tamara. Barely two years afte
r that, Tamara herself—whom Leir had taken to wife within months of Naomi's death, and who would be the closest thing to a mother the infant girl ever knew—also died in childbirth, sacrificing her own life to give life to Jonet's loathsome half- brother Carthac. Leir, Jonet knew from the village gossip she had listened to so avidly, had not even bothered to visit Tamara during the final months of her pregnancy, and it was common knowledge that he had shown no grief at all when she died.
Since then, Leir had taken five more wives, and all of the five were dead, as were the three who had preceded them. There had been a first wife, before Jonet's mother, but Jonet had never known her name. Then had come Naomi, then Tamara, then the following five, which made the new wife number nine. Three of those latter five had borne children to the Druid, and one of those three had died in childbirth. The other two had simply died, somehow, once Leir had begun to tire of them. Of the remaining two, who had not borne children, one had died of a broken neck after falling from a low wall on a dark night, and the other by drowning in a flooded stream bed during a sudden mountain storm. Jonet could not even recall their names. She had neither known nor cared for any of them. She believed implicitly, though, that her father, the Druid, had killed all of them.
He was a frightening man, Leir the Druid, with empty, loveless, even lifeless eyes. Jonet would watch him closely as he sat alone, staring into the distance, even in a tiny, lightless room, muttering to himself in strange and meaningless words. At such times, she knew, he was oblivious to who and where he was. And even though she had no proof that such a thing was true, she knew beyond doubt that he would kill anyone who disturbed him then. He would snuff out their lives without remorse and without pity, simply for having brought themselves to his attention when he wished to be alone. That, she was convinced, was what had happened to his wives.
