Uther cc-7

by Jack Whyte

  "Wait!"

  Nemo stopped dead. Turned around.

  Merlyn was still frowning at her, his expression speculative. "Is Uther well?"

  Nemo nodded again, and Merlyn's frown grew deeper. "What's the matter, can't you speak?"

  Nemo cleared her throat. "Aye, sir . . . Commander. King Uther is well." Her voice sounded rusty and unused.

  "Good. And he is still in Tir Manha?"

  "Aye, sir."

  "And how goes his kingdom nowadays? Is all well? It has been what, a year, since he was chosen? As King? Aye, it must be, and nine months since he threw Lot's crew out of Cambria and chased them screaming back to Cornwall. Has he no plans to visit us here soon?"

  Strange thoughts were passing through Nemo's mind. There was something in the tone of Merlyn's voice as he spoke to her that set her instincts aquiver. Looking into his eyes, she felt that Merlyn meant the opposite of what he was saying, and that he would be perfectly happy never to see his cousin Uther again. It made no sense to her, and she could see no reason for it, but she knew that Merlyn Britannicus had no wish for Uther ever to return to Camulod.

  She said nothing but only stood staring at him, holding herself upright and at attention, her helmet clutched in her bent left arm. Nothing of what she was thinking showed on her face. Her expression remained unchanged, her close-set black eyes unreadable beneath the frowning, unbroken bar of her thick brows.

  "Well? Does my cousin plan to visit us?"

  Nemo blinked, aware of a need to answer. She nodded her head. "Don't know, sir. Doesn't speak to me. Not of plans."

  "Hmm. Very well. My thanks for bringing these." He held up the leather wallet. "Are you instructed to wait for a response?"

  "No, sir."

  "Good. You may go."

  Nemo saluted smartly and spun on her heel, then marched away as though she were on parade, feeling his eyes on her until she had marched out of the building and into the sunlight again. She turned right, and then as soon as she was out of sight of the administrative building, she broke step and put her helmet on, tapping it firmly down over her brows with the flat of one hand. Then she fastened her chinstrap and adjusted her cheek-flaps before walking on normally, her mind seething with unaccustomed, troublesome thoughts of Caius Merlyn Britannicus.

  She had known Merlyn for years, ever since his boyhood, but he had never come to know her at all, and she and Uther had both preferred to keep it that way for their own reasons. Now she sensed instinctually a very real menace emanating from Merlyn Britannicus and directed towards Uther.

  Merlyn had changed. His attitude to Uther had changed. He no longer bubbled with that warm, open, pleasure-filled joy of companionship and brotherhood that had always made her feel jealous and left out when the two were together. Merlyn no longer loved Uther. That made her blink. Did she truly believe that? She was unsure. But Merlyn no longer laughed with joy at the thought of seeing Uther, and she would happily swear to the truth of that.

  For the space of half a heartbeat, she wondered which way to go, and then she turned sharply right, simply because Merlyn and the administrative building lay to her left. She took one quick step and collided immediately with a woman who had been walking towards her. The frail figure practically bounced off the solid bulk of her body and fell backwards, a flailing bundle of blue-clad limbs. Nemo hurled herself forward instantly, her arms scooping in front of her, and managed to catch the reeling woman before she hit the ground. The woman's eyes were wide with shock and incomprehension, and the cowl that had covered her head and concealed her face had fallen away to reveal long, once-black hair, heavily shot through with grey, and wide, startlingly blue eyes. Nemo recognized her, and her heart leaped with fright at the thought that she had almost killed Uther's grandmother, Luceiia Varrus.

  Luceiia made it clear that she was uninjured and would like to be allowed to regain her feet, and Nemo released her awkwardly, helping her to stand up before doing so. Then the old woman nodded and brushed herself down, absently patting the arm of another, younger woman who was her companion, reassuring her that she was uninjured. Now Luceiia composed herself and turned back to Nemo, nodding her head and looking up into her eyes.

  "Thank you, young man," she said. "I know not how you managed to move so quickly, but I am very glad you did. I find that I am very slightly out of breath, but otherwise none the worse for wear. Hitting you was rather like hitting a wall, I believe, although I never have hit a wall quite that hard." She stopped and looked around, aware for the first time of the crowd of onlookers who had stopped to gawk at her. "Thank you all," she said in a tone that was eloquently dismissive. "I am quite well now and have suffered no harm, thanks to the quick-wittedness of this young man. Please go about your affairs now." She stood and watched the people hesitate and then move on, and then she turned back to Nemo, cocking her head to one side. "That is the uniform of the Pendragon Guards, is it not? The Dragons?" Nemo cleared her throat but could only nod. The old woman blinked at her. "I thought so. I should know my own grandson's emblem. And your name is?"

  Again Nemo cleared her throat, and then she spoke in her deepest voice, keenly aware that Luceiia thought she was a man. The words resonated inside her helmet, sounding distorted to her own ears. "Geddius, Milady. I'm Geddius." The lie was out before she knew it was there, but it was born of an irrational fear that Luceiia might complain to her grandson that she had been jostled by one of his men. Had this been anyone else in the world. Nemo would have been contemptuous, but she was well aware of the incomprehensible awe and love that Uther held for his aged grandmother.

  Luceiia was peering sharply at her, trying to make out the features beneath the full face-guards of Nemo's huge trooper's helmet, but Nemo knew that the old woman could see little more than the gleam of her eyes.

  "Have you brought messages from Uther?"

  Another nod. "Yes, Milady. Dispatches for Lord Merlyn."

  "I see. Well, I trust we shall find out what my grandson has to say before the morning's done. For the time being, once again, I thank you, young man. But perhaps in future you might pay more attention to your surroundings as you make your way. Good day to you. Come, Deirdre."

  Nemo stepped back, watching with awe as the old woman began to move away, and only at the last moment did her eyes move to the younger woman whom Luceiia Varrus had called Deirdre. She found the woman gazing back at her, the tiniest frown marring the smooth skin between her brows, and something about the sight of her brought Nemo snapping back to awareness. She knew this woman, but she had no idea from where. Then, as Luceiia Varrus took the other's arm and they began to move away, she saw the huge swelling of a late-term pregnancy showing unmistakably beneath Deirdre's gown.

  Nemo stood in the middle of the roadway and watched the two women head towards the entrance of the administrative building, seeing the almost reverential way in which the ordinary people looked at them in passing. A trio of off-duty garrison troopers standing talking near the doors stopped their conversation and held themselves at respectful attention as the women passed by them, and only resumed talking after Luceiia and her companion had disappeared inside.

  Nemo wandered over to where they stood, schooling her face to appear no more than casually interested. The troopers paused as she drew near them, and one of them nodded courteously. Nemo nodded back and used her "man's" voice.

  "Just got in from Cambria. Who's the woman with the Lady Luceiia?"

  The man who had nodded to her grinned. "That's the Lady Deirdre, Commander Merlyn's wife."

  "Hmm." Nemo jerked her head in a nod of thanks and farewell and walked away, her head spinning with speculation.

  Chapter TWENTY

  "That's the Lady Deirdre, Commander Merlyn's wife."

  The words echoed in Nemo's head as she walked away, following the slight, naturally declining gradient of the hilltop until she found herself approaching the main gates of the fortress. They were wide open at this time of the day, and she noticed that the guar
ds on duty, none of whom she recognized, were having an easy time, lounging indolently as they supervised the few vehicles that came and went while keeping a wary eye alert for approaching officers.

  She had almost drawn level with the gates when she became aware that someone behind her was calling her name repeatedly, and she turned her head to see who was shouting at her. When she saw the waving hand and its owner's grinning face, with its artificially enhanced colouring and enormous, Hashing eyes, she grew angry at herself immediately for even looking, and for not recognizing that distinctive voice immediately. It belonged to Nennius, one of the masseurs who worked in the bathhouse. Sexuality of any kind was immaterial to Nemo, whose interest in such things was virtually nil, so she had no difficulty with the knowledge that Nennius's preference was for boys and men, but the fellow was an inveterate talker who was incapable of keeping quiet and had an unquenchable thirst for other people's business, and his incessant chatter always threatened to drive her mad.

  Nennius, however, had been indefatigable in pursuing Nemo's friendship ever since the earliest days of her arrival in Camulod and he had steadfastly refused to take offence or to be discouraged by her continuous and ill-mannered hostility towards him. How could he take offence, he had asked her repeatedly, when he understood too well the pain with which she had to live incessantly, day in and day out? They were two of a kind, he assured her, but of different aspects, like the two faces of a coin. Nemo was a man cursed by some malign fate to live his life inside a woman's body, whereas Nennius was a woman walled up inside the body of a man. So brazen had Nennius been in his pursuit of Nemo, and so unfailingly charming and attentive to her, that even Nemo's immeasurable fund of ill nature had eventually been exhausted, and she had begun to develop a tolerance for his attentions, accepting and eventually even coming to enjoy his therapeutic ministrations in the massage room after she had bathed and sweated the soreness out of hard-used muscles, nevertheless insisting upon what was, for Nennius, an almost unbearable degree of silence.

  Today, Nemo had neither time nor patience to spare for Nennius, and she waved him away with a deep scowl that even Nennius, thick-skinned as he was, had no choice but to accept. He held up both hands in a gesture of apology and then stood there watching Nemo as she strode away through the gates.

  Merlyn Britannicus had taken a wife, and he had said nothing about it—had sent no notice, either before or after the event—to Uther Pendragon. The insult was unforgivable. Nothing on earth. Nemo knew, would have kept Uther from attending his cousin's nuptial feast had he known of it. Nemo felt the unmistakable stirring of nausea in her guts and sucked air in deeply, holding it hard and willing her insides to settle down, but her head felt light and giddy and there was a high-pitched whining in her ears. No matter what she thought of Merlyn Britannicus personally—and she had held many different feelings for him in the years that she had known him, ranging from admiration to dislike, from envy to indifference and even to blind jealousy—he was one of the underlying constants of her life. His life, in many ways, defined hers. His behaviour had always had a beneficent influence on his more volatile cousin, and Nemo had benefited directly from that. In consequence, the information she had just received, deepening her conviction that something had gone seriously wrong in Merlyn's dealings with Uther, was devastating.

  And this was all because of a woman. That information taunted her, spinning slowly in the air slightly beyond her grasp. An unknown woman was threatening all that Nemo held to be of value. A complete stranger, a creature who had sprung out of nowhere and was completely unknown to Uther Pendragon, whose world she was about to destroy by depriving him, for her own selfish reasons, of his lifelong friend and closest companion. By destroying Merlyn's trust in Uther, which she had evidently begun to do already, this woman would surely demolish Uther's ability to trust anyone else in future. By stealing Merlyn's friendship away from Uther, with neither reason nor provocation, this woman had demonstrated that, whoever she might be, she was a self-centred and remorseless thief.

  Nemo had spent her entire adult life among rough and violent troopers, and she had heard all of them talk at one time or another, some with cynical amusement and others with angry scorn, about how a woman—any woman—could divide and alienate the best and oldest of friends and set brothers at each other's throats, all because of that terrifying thing called love. A hundred times and more she must have heard those tales, and she had always doubted them, taking them, as men say, with a grain of salt to help her swallow them.

  Now. however, she had no choice other than to face this reality, and so she began to plan. She had never been in a similar situation before, but she was not completely without direction on how to proceed, for one of the first and best-learned lessons she had absorbed from Garreth Whistler, while he was teaching it to Uther Pendragon, was that no one, no commander of any rank or stature, should ever commit his resources to a fight or a struggle without first finding out everything there was to know about the forces against which the fight would be waged.

  "Know your enemy." As soon as Nemo remembered the instruction, she immediately began to wonder where she might start digging for information on this Lady Deirdre. No sooner had she asked it of herself, however, than she answered it with a response that surprised her with its simplicity. Nennius the masseur would know everything there was to know about Merlyn Britannicus's new wife, simply because that kind of information was precisely what Nennius thrived upon. The woman was young, pregnant and newly, suddenly arrived. Nemo was sure of that, because there had been no sign of anyone resembling a Lady Deirdre the last time she had been here bearing dispatches from Uther to Camulod, and that had been less than four months earlier. So, this Deirdre had sprung out of nowhere and captured the love of Merlyn Britannicus. Where could she have come from? And when could he have met her? Nemo knew that Nennius would have done everything in his power to satisfy his insatiable curiosity on such important points.

  Moments later, she was striding towards the bathhouse again, her fingers fumbling with the clasp of her cloak as she prepared to throw it off, along with the rest of her clothing and her boots, and to pass as quickly as she could through the intermediate pools to the rear room that held the stone-built plinths of the masseurs. As she shed her clothing she made her way to the steam room, calling for Nennius to alert him that she would have need of his talents.

  It turned out to be more difficult that she had thought it would be to simply lie there quietly, saying nothing while Nennius kneaded and belaboured her like a large lump of dough, talking all the time as though his tongue and his breathing were irreversibly interconnected. Several times, Nemo had to restrain herself forcibly from turning on him to rend him with her tongue for fear that this time he might take offence and refuse to speak to her again. She was burning with the need to talk to him about what troubled her, but she knew that would be the worst thing she could do because, Nennius being who and what he was, she could afford to give him no slightest inkling of a suspicion that she was even remotely interested in Merlyn Britannicus's new wife. Accordingly, she gritted her teeth and tried to shut out what he was saying to her. Occasionally, she grunted with pain for, kindred spirit or no, Nennius was being anything but gentle with her. Nemo recognized that he was punishing her, albeit very slightly, for her earlier discourtesy.

  On arriving, she had grunted an apology to him, muttering that she had had important matters on her mind. Nennius had waved that aside as being of no importance, and had then launched into his normal chronicle of news and information from all over Britain, collected from every conceivable and available source to which he had access. Nennius was very proud of what he called "my people," the network of informants who kept him supplied with information, and he liked to convey the impression that if he did not quite know anyone and everyone who was worth knowing, he at least knew someone else who did.

  It had been no accident that she had apologized for her rudeness by asserting that she had important mat
ters on her mind. Nennius was well aware that Nemo was King Uther's most trusted personal messenger, and that every time Nemo came alone to Camulod, it was to deliver dispatches from Uther to Merlyn. He had never been able to gain the tiniest insight from Nemo in the past regarding what she carried or what her dispatches might portend, but Nennius was a creature who lived in hope, and this was the first time he had ever seen or suspected Nemo to be disgruntled with any aspect of her tasks. Finally, and with what he imagined to be great subtlety, Nennius manoeuvred the conversation to the point where he could ask, with the disdainful tones of utter disinterest, what it was that had upset Nemo so visibly earlier that afternoon.

  Nemo grunted and turned her head to look up at him. raising an eyebrow, openly intimating that the question was impertinent.

  Nennius then shrugged and went on to point out that he had no interest in the specifics of anything, but was merely curious as to why his friend Nemo should have been so put out that she could then be rude to a perfectly inoffensive friend who merely happened to be passing by and waved to say hello.

  Nemo nodded at that, muttering that Nennius was right and that there had been no call for her to be so rude. She had been angry, she- said, because she had gone to call upon Commander Merlyn at the administrative building and had been kept waiting for the longest time because the Commander was closeted with some young woman— some woman on the verge of having a child. She would not normally have minded being kept waiting. Nemo said, but she had arrived only a short time earlier and had gone directly to deliver her dispatches.

  which she had been told were urgent. What that urgency might imply, she had no idea, but King Uther had been specific in his instructions. Nemo had been told to waste not a moment in delivering the wallet containing the King's messages into the hands of Merlyn Britannicus. And she had found it galling that, after riding day and night through foul weather to carry out his orders, she should then be forced to stand around and wait for such a length of time while Commander Merlyn took his pleasure with some young wench.