Uther cc-7

by Jack Whyte

  She filled the nosebag with oats, then scooped up her metal helmet and removed its leather liner. A steady stream of rainwater poured from one end of the sagging remnant of roof, and Nemo moved towards it, holding her helmet upside down to catch the falling water. When it was almost completely filled, she held it carefully in the crook of her elbow and bent to pick up the nosebag, and then she made her way around the sagging wall to the rear of the building.

  The horse was used to being hobbled and made no attempt to move away as Nemo knelt awkwardly, fighting the stiffness of her armour as she fastened the restraints around his forelegs; he knew that as soon as she had finished with the hobbling, she would stand up and remove the bridle and the hated bit from his mouth. Moments later, his head was free and he was slurping noisily from the water in the helmet. He was not very thirsty, however, and he soon tossed his head to show that he had had enough. Muttering softly to him, allowing him to hear the comforting sound of her voice rather than any kind of sensible words, Nemo strapped on his nosebag and left him to eat. He tossed his head gently and stomped about a little until he had himself placed the way he wanted, rump firmly presented to the unfriendly wind, and then he lowered his head and its hanging bag to the ground and settled down to eat his oats. Nemo watched him for a moment or two and then collected her helmet and left him there.

  Back by the fireside, Nemo sat on the saddle and undid the fastenings of her armoured coat, then spread it wide, throwing it open to allow the heat to penetrate her damp, quilted tunic. She reached beneath her right arm to pull out the thick leather wallet that she carried there for safety, protected, like her heart itself, by the thick armour of her fighting coat. The wallet contained the dispatches that Uther had entrusted to her care for delivery to Merlyn, and she peered down at it closely to make sure that it was still securely closed. Then she tugged hard on the strap that crossed her chest and held the wallet firmly in its place, testing it, too, before thrusting the wallet back into place beneath her arm. She used the blanket from her saddlebag then to dry her face and neck as well as she could, towelling her short-cropped, wet hair. Stripping completely to dry herself properly would have meant stripping off her armour, and when it was cold, wet and stiff, removing armour became a formidable task. Putting it back on quickly would have been simply impossible, and there was something too intimidating about exposing herself naked to anything that might be out there watching in the night, seeing her barely sheltered by broken walls and a sagging fragment of roof, and lit up by the fitful, flickering firelight, with the darkness pressing in upon her from every side.

  When she was as dry as she could be, she propped the damp blanket up beside the fire, one end of it weighted and secured on the ground by a few large stones, and the other raised towards the fire on two long sticks stuck into the dirt. She sat beneath its shelter then and fed herself slowly, cutting pieces of smoke-cured, salted venison from the supply she carried in one of the pockets of the deep leather scrip that hung by her side. She chewed each piece slowly, savouring the deep, smoky tang of the meat and feeling the warmth of the fire slowly begin to penetrate the quilted thickness of her tunic. After attending to her horse again, she finally lay down beneath the blanket lean-to and slept fitfully, waking every now and then to feed the fire, prompted by fears of what she would have to go through to light it again if she allowed it to die out completely.

  In the morning, she was still cold to the bone, shivering in her wet clothes and heavy, chafing armour. The daylight, uninspiring as it was, nevertheless encouraged her to take thought for herself and her welfare, and she swallowed her misery and went back out into the rain to gather more armloads of firewood to replace what she was using. She then built the fire up into a roaring blaze and stripped naked in its warmth, towelling heat and life back into her body with the warm blanket. She warmed most of her cloth garments close by the fire while she sat huddled nearby, wrapped in her blanket, planning how she would handle the day ahead of her. As she did so, she ate a dry breakfast of roast grains, shelled hazelnuts and chopped, sun-dried fruit. After leaving the shelter briefly to relieve herself, she squatted naked for a while in front of the flames, holding her blanket wide open and allowing the radiant warmth to wash over her until every bit of her felt stretched and tingling with the heat. Then, precisely at the moment when she felt she could absorb no more without burning up, she turned away and pulled dry, light underclothing from her saddlebag. After that, she slung her precious dispatch wallet across her chest and tucked it beneath her arm again before pulling on her damp, heavy tunic and leggings, her heavy woollen socks and iron-studded boots, and dashing out quickly to bring her horse into the building itself. Beneath the roof and out of the rain, she rubbed him down as well as she could, leaning heavily on the stiff-bristled grooming brush and taking plenty of time as she squeezed and combed the night's moisture out of his heavy coat, taking particular care with the broad expanse of his back, where the chafing weight of the heavy cavalry saddle, imperfectly placed, could quickly make the animal's discomfort intolerable.

  After she had saddled her mount, she laid her main armour—a heavy leather coat and wide, trousered leggings of the same leather, all sewn with thousands of tiny, overlapping metal rings—across the saddle and lashed together her shield, helmet, cuirass and thigh guards, using their own leather straps and buckles to join them to each other, before laying them over the ring-mail and covering them with her heavy woollen cloak.

  A wide, strongly made sword belt supported a sheathed Roman- style short-sword that hung by her right side, its handle projecting just behind the large leather scrip that also hung there, and a matching dagger rode by her left hip. Attached to the sword belt in two places, ahead of and behind the dagger on her left side, another belt of the same weight and thickness rose diagonally between her breasts and crossed her right shoulder. Fastened to the back of it, between her shoulder blades, hung the wide iron ring that supported her sword. Nemo pulled the long cavalry sword from where it had stood in the floor all night supporting her cloak and used both her hands to guide it into place. Satisfied with the feel of it then, she took hold of the horse's bridle and led it out into the weather, where she turned her face in the direction of Camulod. She decided to walk, to keep herself warm and conserve the animal's strength, since she herself was unencumbered by armour and therefore able to move more quickly and easily.

  Almost six hours later, Nemo was beyond weariness. Her entire attention was focused solely upon reaching Camulod and its hot baths as quickly as she could. The rain had stopped more than an hour earlier, and encouraged by a break in the clouds and a flash of blue sky that she had seen off to her right, she had stopped in an empty cattle byre and dressed herself again in full armour, prepared to ride into Camulod properly attired. But no sooner had she pulled herself back up into the saddle after that than the rain began again, heavier than ever. Her final reserves of patience vanished almost immediately, although now she could almost see the topmost towers of the rear walls of Camulod as she spurred her horse to scramble up the steep slope at the back of the hill. The walls were very close, but they were almost completely obscured by a billowing, low-lying cloud that shrouded the entire hilltop, it's sullen weight spewing rain.

  Cursing and muttering to herself, Nemo urged her horse forward along the path that was now growing rapidly less steep. As she looked up into the slanting rain, she heard a sentry's challenge and the blowing of a trumpet to summon the guard commander.

  "Who goes there?"

  Nemo cocked her head, hoping to identify the voice, but it was unrecognizable.

  "Nemo," she shouted back. "Decurion. Uther's Dragons. From King Uther, with word for Merlyn Britannicus. Nemo."

  There was silence for a spell, and then a new voice, one she knew well, came down to her.

  "Nemo? Is that you? What did you do last time when you came back from Glevum ?"

  "Chain duty. Four months you gave me. Centurion Dedalus. You know it's me. Let me in."<
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  The heavy gate swung open and Nemo spurred her horse forward, passing through the entrance and the narrow new curtain passageway that had been built inside it after Lot's first, near fatal assault. She glanced up at the faces of the guards looking down at her front the high walls, recognizing a few of them and seeing for the first time how effective this winding passage was. Anyone attacking through this door in future would have to fight their way through a narrow, high-walled tunnel lined with defenders above them at every step.

  "Hey, Hard-Nose, you look as though you've been out in the rain!"

  Nemo ignored the taunt and all the others like it as she made her way through to the end of the curtainway. There, in a wider but still confined courtyard, she was met by Dedalus and a trooper who stepped forward to take her horse. She raised her hand to wave the trooper away, but Dedalus forestalled her.

  "Let him take the horse. Nemo. You look as though you'll have enough to do taking care of yourself. My advice would be to stop at the bathhouse before you go anywhere or do anything else. It should be quiet there at this time of day."

  Nemo hesitated, looking at him with a scowl, and then she shrugged her broad shoulders and reached for her saddlebags, slinging them over one shoulder and relinquishing the horse to the trooper with a surly nod.

  "Merlyn Britannicus?"

  Dedalus knew what she meant. "He's out on patrol, but not a long one. He'll be back later this afternoon. They're getting ready to leave on an expedition to the other side of the country, Verulamium. to attend a meeting of churchmen."

  Nemo was not interested in churchmen. "I have messages for him from King Uther."

  "I know, I heard you. He should be back by the time you have thawed out. Do you have any dry clothing with you? No? Then go ahead and warm yourself back to humanity. You can eat later, once you feel better. In the meantime, I'll send someone to the laundry to find you some clean clothing. He'll bring it to you in the bathhouse. I'll tell him to shout out your name and leave the new clothing in the dressing rooms. Leave your armour there for him, too, he'll pick that up at the same time and take it to one of the smithies to dry out near the forges before it can start to rust."

  "It won't rust. The rings are bronze."

  Dedalus twisted up his face and shook his head as though in pity. "Nemo, do you really think I didn't know that? Go now. Away with you." He paused, eyeing her as she turned to go, and called her back. "No, wait you, Nemo . . . Before you go to the bathhouse, you might feel better to know that your dispatches for Commander Merlyn are safe. Where are they?"

  Nemo glowered at him, then reached across with her left hand and patted her armour on the right side. "They're safe."

  Dedalus grinned. "Aye, safe now, but will you take them into the hot pool with you?" He watched her blink, then start to frown, her scowl deepening by the moment, and he took pity on her. "What you need to do, Nemo, is find someone that you can trust . . . and if there's no one you can trust, then find someone you know Uther would trust. Were I you, I'd take my dispatches into the administration building and leave them with one of the senior legates there before I went to bathe. Titus or Flavius, doesn't matter which. They are equally trustworthy."

  Nemo looked at him narrowly and then looked down at the arm still stretched across her breast. She hovered indecisively for several moments, and then nodded once and made directly for the administrative building.

  An hour later, having made her progress through the intermediate baths. Nemo was luxuriating in the calidariun, the deep hot pool, and deliberating with herself whether or not she would make the effort to climb out and make her way into the curtained-off sudarium, the steam room, where the tiled walls and hanging leather curtains contained the roiling clouds of vapour that belched out of floor-level vents, heated to boiling by the furnace below the bathhouse. She decided to remain where she was, thinking that she could never have enough of this magnificent hot water and remembering, too, how she had believed, only short hours before, that she might never again be warm.

  There were only two others in the bathhouse with her, and two more had been leaving when she arrived. All of them had known and recognized her, and had acknowledged her with nods. None of them had attempted to speak to her, and none had paid any attention to her sex, elaborately ignoring her nakedness as though it were as unremarkable as their own. Nemo had barely noticed. She had settled all of that kind of nonsense very emphatically long years before.

  Apart from the most basic and obvious evidence of her femininity, her appearance was very masculine. She had always been short and squat of stature as a child, with immense strength for her size and age, and by the time she had volunteered for Uther's cavalry force, her arms, chest, back and shoulders were massive and dense with muscle. Her breasts and pectorals were less feminine than many a man's, except that they were hairless and tipped with large and obviously female nipples. Her hips and buttocks, belly and thighs, were lean and hard. Only the black-haired cleft at her centre ruined the illusion of swarthy, virile strength and male vitality.

  And yet, there had been some among the troopers of Camulod who had insisted upon seeing only the woman in her. purely from the perspective of male rut. Her female body, unused, was an insult to their manhood. Many ventured to deal with her as they thought appropriate, singly and in groups. And all of them failed, humiliatingly and publicly, because, brutal and debased as they might have been, they could not conceive of, let alone match. Nemo's implacably savage response to their assaults. Where they had sought to bully and conquer her as a woman, she had responded as a threatened man, maiming and disabling, so that invariably they went reeling and limping, broken and bleeding, in every direction. Two of these died, killed in the struggle when a group of six of them jumped her here in this very bathhouse. One of those deaths came from a straight-armed smash with Nemo's open hand, the heel of which drove one attacker's nose bone into his brain. The second was caused when another assailant slipped and fell, trying to dodge a flying kick that would have unmanned him. He landed strangely and crushed his skull between the corner edges of the deep pool. Two more of the surviving four had been grievously injured, one with a broken leg and the other with shattered ribs, before the other two fled, unsatisfied.

  The official inquiry into the matter exonerated Nemo. She had acted in self-defence, it was said, and therefore legitimately. Merlyn Britannicus had raised a questioning eyebrow on more than one occasion as the inquiry progressed, but he had invariably bowed to the judgment of his cousin Uther, who stood staunchly behind his subordinate and insisted that she be treated as a trooper, first and foremost, and as a woman only incidentally and under protest. And whenever one or another of the Roman-trained officers of Camulod questioned the propriety of having women in the ranks, as several of them did, Uther withered them with scorn, citing the names of Boudicca and a dozen other notable Celtic women, all of them renowned as warriors, and several among them Pendragon chieftains. He rattled off their names with impressive speed, proclaiming them unimpeachable examples of how the women of Celtic Britain had always fought as equals with their men.

  After that, the realization had sunk home to everyone that Nemo was not to be trifled with. If you had to fight her as you would a man in order to possess her, the common wisdom of the day held, then she was a man—and what did that say about you? Thereafter, she mingled freely with the other troopers, going naked among them in the bathhouse, and only newcomers took notice of her—and then only for a short time, until they could be taken aside and warned.

  Later, dressed from the skin out in fresh, clean clothes and wearing only the light, dress armour of the Camulodian garrison troopers, Nemo stepped out of the bathhouse to discover that the storm had passed while she was indoors and the entire world about her had changed. The sky over her head was bright blue and cloudless, and the air was clean-scented and warm with the appropriate warmth of July. Even the muddy cobblestone street was drying rapidly.

  A pair of troopers came towards he
r, evidently headed for the bathhouse, and she saw at first glance that they had just returned from a patrol of some kind, for their cloaks were wet and travel- stained. She held up one hand to attract their attention and asked them if they knew whether Merlyn had returned. They both nodded and one of them waved his hand in the general direction of the administrative building.

  Nemo strode past the guards and through the doors directly to the desk of the Officer of the Day, where the Legate Titus was deep in conversation with another travel-weary newcomer. Titus saw her approach from the corner of his eye and without interrupting his conversation reached sideways beneath his table to pick up the wallet she had left in his care, then held it up above his head for her to take from him in passing. She collected it and moved straight on past the desk towards the door that was Merlyn's day-room, where she stopped on the threshold and knocked.

  "Come!"

  Inside, Merlyn Britannicus slouched in a high-backed, armless chair by a long work table in front of a high, double-arched window. He was reading something, a document of some kind, holding the cylindrical scroll up to the light with both hands and frowning as he whispered the words to himself. He paid no attention to Nemo until he had finished, and he allowed the scroll to spring shut before throwing it onto the tabletop.

  "Damnation," he muttered, looking up to see who had come into the room. When he saw Nemo, he frowned and cocked his head to one side in a gesture that said plainly that he ought to know the person he was seeing but could not put a name to him. Then he stood up. quickly, the frown on his face deepening.

  "You're one of Uther's people, are you not? The one called Nemo . . . That's right. . . Is your master here? In Camulod?"

  Nemo held herself at attention but shook her head, unwilling as always to speak aloud. Instead, she held out the leather document case and stepped quickly forward. Merlyn moved to take it, slowly, his eyes searching her face, but as soon as his hands had closed over the case she relinquished it, took one step back and snapped into a cavalry salute before spinning on her heel and beginning to march out.