The Singing Sword cc-2

by Jack Whyte

  "Save him, Varrus, you son of a raddled whore! Throw that thing down. That sword. Now. Over here, by me. Throw it!" He was screaming at the top of his voice and I was terrified that he would kill the child in spite of everything.

  I had no choice. I looked at Enid's body, now grown still and odd-looking in the strangeness of death. I looked at Caius and saw blood bubbling slowly from his neck, around the hilt of the Catamite's blade. The Catamite himself was about two paces behind me, crawling painfully, scrabbling at the marble-tiled floor. I thought of all the blood and all the carnage and the misery and pain that had spilled down from that one day so many years ago, and my anger and grief overwhelmed me. My dear friend Phoebe had died for that, and now Enid, and Caius. All the innocents. I turned my back on Seneca and raised my new sword high. The skystone dagger fell at my feet as I grasped the cross-hilt in both hands and drove the point downward, like a spear, between the Catamite's shoulders and into his evil heart.

  "Varrus!" The voice was an insane scream. "I gave you an order! Didn't you hear me? I gave you an order!"

  I turned my head slowly, incredulous, to look at him, and at the sight of him I closed my eyes.

  "That thing! That sword! I want it over here. Now!"

  I gripped the hilt firmly and began to work it slowly back and forth, loosening it until I could pull it from the corpse, and then I flung it to him, beyond caring any more. The baby had to live. If I gave in to him, surely not even as demented a thing as he could kill a baby... ? The sword clanged loudly on the marble floor and slid to his feet. Still holding the infant high, he stretched with one foot and kicked it away from him, behind him.

  "Now down! On your knees, you crippled pig!" I felt every one of my fifty-seven years, and I felt my spirit give way inside me. A small, surprised and clear-toned voice inside my head was saying that I had never seen so much blood in one room before. It was everywhere, and none of it was mine, and none of it was Seneca's, but it was everyone else's. Even the baby was bleeding now, where Seneca had nicked his tiny cheek with his blade. I could see Cay's blood, and Enid's blood, and the Catamite's blood, and the blood of the other men I had killed. Soon now, I knew, I would see my own blood, too, for I had lost the will to fight any more. I wanted it to be over. My eyes blurred with tears and I sobbed aloud, not caring I was beaten, for I knew he would kill the child. I fell to my knees. I had lost track of time and place and reason. I saw only blood and I wanted an end to it. And then I saw Seneca straighten up even more and step back a pace.

  "Get away!" he screamed. "Back, or I kill the brat!" Bemused, I looked around me and saw Plautus framed in the doorway behind me, and my own sanity returned in a rush. I put one hand on the bloody floor and pushed myself to my feet.

  Plautus still held the long-sword in his right hand. His left was clutched around the hilt of a gladium that protruded from his chest. His face was deathly pale and his eyes seemed to burn in their sunken sockets. He walked like a drunken man, one slow, staggering step at a time. There was death in his face — death for Claudius Seneca. Seneca side-stepped, moving crabwise away from him, screaming again that he would kill the child.

  Plautus swayed to a halt. "Go ahead," he said, in a clear, small voice. "It's not mine. I don't care. All I care about is killing you, you stinking vomit."

  I saw my skystone dagger lying on the floor at my feet; I saw Plautus take another lurching step; and then I saw Caius move, just as Plautus fell to his knees, blood gouting from his mouth.

  Seneca, unbelievably, began to laugh, a high-pitched, gibbering giggle that chilled me. He took two more sideways steps away from Plautus, still holding the baby and his own blade high above his head, and then he shook them both, blade and baby, staring at Plautus, who was trying to regain his feet. At this point, Seneca's own right heel came to rest in the angle of the cross-guard of Excalibur. He glanced quickly down, saw what it was, and kicked it away from him again. It slid across the marble floor, this time to stop in front of the open eyes of Caius Britannicus.

  Somehow, incredibly, Plautus staggered erect again and took another stumbling, implacable step towards Seneca. As he did so I stooped and snatched up my dagger. Seneca whimpered like a child, took another skipping step backwards and then rose to his tiptoes, stretching high in the air, his eyes darting from one to the other of us as Caius Britannicus somehow swung Excalibur from where he lay, flat on the floor. The edge of the shining blade sliced into the back of Seneca's bare knees, cutting the stretched tendons, dropping him immediately and flopping him backwards so that his shoulders hit the floor. The baby Merlyn landed on his dying grandfather. Seneca screamed like a woman, squirming frantically, trying to get up, but crippled far worse than I had ever been. The baby's screams were tiny, lost in his.

  I walked across to where he lay, and it seemed to take hours for me to reach him. He scrabbled for me with clawed fingers, shrieking and spitting. I grasped the sword's hilt and pulled it free from where it was trapped in the fold of his legs, feeling it cut through more meat as I dragged it away. My face felt frozen. Caius lay behind Seneca, his screaming grandson clutched protectively in his left arm. The blood had ceased to pump from the wound in his neck. He was very still. I looked at his face, so pale, and time slowed down once more as I flexed my fingers around the hilt of the great sword. Then, ignoring the screams and sounds he was hurling at me, I raised Excalibur high above my head and swung it down with all my strength, striking Caesarius Claudius Seneca's head from his body. Plautus said, "Good man!" in a blood-choked voice, and I heard one last crash from behind me. I did not need to look to know that he had fallen on his face, onto the hilt of the sword that protruded from his chest.

  Moving slowly, I crossed the room to the pile of garments that had been stripped from Enid earlier and draped them across her ravaged, nude body. Then I picked up my great-nephew and carried him out of that slaughterhouse.

  The baby quieted as we walked through the warm, sunlit afternoon. I carried him in the crook of my left arm, the way his Grandfather Caius had carried him, and in my right I clutched Excalibur. Somewhere in the distance I could hear the sounds of battle, but I did not care. There was a lark singing in the sky high above me and a blackbird trilling close by. I heard my name being called and heard hoofbeats coming towards me at the gallop, but I didn't care. The forge would be quiet and safe for the baby, and it would be dark and warm. That was all I cared about.

  I, too, had to find a dark, safe place, dark enough to hide me from the horrors tearing at my mind.

  EPILOGUE: SUMMER, 401 A.D.

  Ullic clapped me on the shoulder, got up from his stool and went out into the bright, hot day, leaving his heavy, ceremonial helmet on the bench beside me. It crossed my mind to call him back for it, but then I thought that, eagle helmet though it might be, it was not going to fly away and he would come back for it later. I smiled at the thought and reached for the pot of polishing oil I had been using, but my outstretched fingers caught the rim of it and the pot overturned, spilling the thin oil over my work-bench. I cursed and scrambled to pick up the odds and ends threatened by the spill, and felt a lance of remembered pain pierce me as my hand closed over a rolled scroll that had lain forgotten there at the back of my bench for months. I stood as though petrified for a few moments clutching the thing, and then I sat back on my stool, leaving the spilt oil to do what it would and unrolling the parchment for the second time since I had received it.

  Greetings, Father,

  You have been proven prophetic. Stilicho has recalled me to Rome. The barbarian King Alaric — how unlike our own dear friend — and his Visigoths stand poised to attack the Motherland itself. My preparations are being made in haste, for I must move with all possible speed. Stilicho's word is peremptory. "Come at once," he bids me. "Bring your men and leave all else behind." That, in this case, means horses, since I have no way of shipping out all my stock at such short notice. Your commission from Stilicho entitles you to have what I cannot take with me.

&n
bsp; I have dispatched word to my depots in Glevum, Durovernum and Londinium itself to expect your men, who will take the horses I have left for you. In all, there will be six hundred and eighty head. Collect them quickly. I proceed in haste, but there may be others who must follow later. I know you will use the horses well. I shall return for them some day.

  I must rely on you to use your powers of explanation and persuasion with Enid. I have tried to write to her, but find I am unable to write the words I ought to. My wounds have healed, but they have left me speechless and unlovely, so she is encumbered with a husband who is both ugly and absent. Explain to her, if you will, that these cancel each other out. I will return, some day. My love to Publius Varrus and his family. Look after my wife and my son while I am gone.

  Farewell, Picus.

  Addendum: I hear nothing of Seneca since I received my wound. He may have died in the fighting in the north. I hope so. If he still lives, however, he will sail with me to Stilicho's command.

  Even now, months later, the words still had power to hurt.

  The soldier who brought the missive had disturbed me at my work. Luceiia had sent him to me with his message and I had read it and sent him to the kitchens at the fort, thinking he would have to return quickly. But he had asked my pardon and informed me that he was Gwynn, and had been Master of the Stables for Picus here in Britain. Picus had left him behind to work with Victorex, who was now a very old man. Surprised, and still in a state of shock from receipt of the letter, I had welcomed him to our Colony and failed to understand the blankness of his look when I called it by name. I had thought then to explain, but had not had the patience at the time. Instead, I told him that he would learn the whole story later.

  He had smiled at me and saluted crisply, saying he was sure he would, and I stood there and watched him march briskly away, thinking how incredibly young he looked to have already retired from being Master of the Stables of the Imperial Armies of Britain, and thinking also that the story I could have told him was not really long at all.

  Caius Britannicus, who had built this Colony, had been born in the oldest Roman town in Britain, a town built on the site of a settlement already honoured for centuries as the home of Lod, war god of the Trinovantes of the east. Over the four hundred years since then, men had gradually changed its name to Colchester, meaning "the fort on the hill," but Caius had always called it by its real name, its ancient name, Camulodunum, deploring as usual the way men changed things for the sake of change, with no thought of tradition or the ancient value of the thing thus changed.

  Here in his beloved west, on another hill, he had built another fort, this one without a name. It was his mausoleum, standing above his grave. His sister, my wife Luceiia, had named it in his honour, recalling his own words. "None of your Celtic jaw-breakers," she had said. "Give it a new name, this fort on a hill — a British name, not Roman or Celtic. Not Camulodunum, but a name of this land. And make it a simple name, a name that men will hear and know and remember."

  We called it Camulod, in honour of Caius Britannicus, the last of the great Roman Eagles of Britain. When we are dead and gone, men may make of it what they wish.

  I released the scroll; it rewound itself with a parchment rustle, and I wondered if I would ever see Picus Britannicus again. Then I became aware once more of the smoothness of polished wood under the ball of my thumb and looked down at the surface of the case I had spent so much time making. I was not a worker in wood by choice, but I had had no other option than to make this case myself, using as a model the much smaller one left me by my grandfather to hold the skystone dagger, many years before. This case was of planed and polished oak, and set into the lustrous surface of the top was a silver star, trailing a comet-tail of gold. I picked it up and carried it to the back of the forge, where I opened it up and ran my hand once more over the fitted doeskin that lined the interior. It would suffice.

  The sword lay where I had left it, wrapped in a silken cloth that Luceiia would have skinned me alive for taking, had she known. I undid the silk and lifted the weapon that it caressed. Excalibur! The name was right for it. Lightning flickered along its mirrored blade and sparkled on its finely tempered edges that bore marks like the ripple shadows of pure water. This was my lifetime's work: this single sword, unique from the tip of its blade to the scalloped pommel, a sword fit for a king to wield, a king whose day would come long after I was forgotten dust. Whoever he might be, he would have a sword to reckon with, and as long as Excalibur existed, I would never really be forgotten. I hefted it, admiring the play of light on its great cross-guard and loving the textured firmness of the hilt, bound in the belly skin of a giant shark. Caius Britannicus had never had the opportunity to admire the wonder that his Lady of the Lake had provided. But he had swung it once, before it was gripped with shark skin, and it had not slipped in his bloodied hand. I placed it gently in its case, into the doeskin-lined depression shaped so carefully to its size, and closed the lid.

  Ullic's great ceremonial helmet still lay on the bench, and I picked it up and held it at eye-level, looking into the still-fierce, golden eyes of the eagle's head that fronted it above the massive, predatory beak. My professional interest was stirred briefly as I wondered how the artist who made this thing had kept the giant bird so lifelike, but then the eyes dissolved and I saw Caius staring into my face that day, almost fifty years before, when he had found me paralysed among a pile of corpses. A lump swelled in my throat and I grunted and jammed the helmet onto my head. I hoisted the case containing Excalibur up to my shoulder and set out to walk back to my house — to my beloved wife, who might or might not be there, dependent upon her ever-expanding timetable of meetings of the Women's Council — and to the rest of my family and the inheritors of our dream, the grandsons of my best friend and myself.

  I wondered which of the two boys would wield the sword in years to come? Would it be Uther, already a brawler at six months and bold with his mother's magpie beauty, or would it be his gentler cousin, Merlyn, the golden-haired Britannicus? The debate gave me pleasure and I found myself whistling for the first time in months as I walked through the summer sunshine. Equus was coming towards me, deep in conversation with Joseph, the young apprentice who was now our best craftsman. I saw what I had not noticed before — that Joseph was now a full-grown man — and I smiled, accepting the knowledge, once and for all, that the world belonged to the young people now growing, and that my own tasks had almost been completed.

  The End

  Penguin Books

  PENGUIN BOOKS Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto Ontario M4V 3B2

  Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England

  Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

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  Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, cnr Rosedale and Airborne Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

  First published in Viking by Penguin Books Canada Limited, 1993 Published in Penguin Books, 1994 9 10 8

  Copyright © Jack Whyte, 1993 All rights reserved.

  Publisher's note: The Singing Sword is based in part on actual events, but all the principal characters are fictional.

  Manufactured in Canada

  Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Date Whyte, Jack, 1940- The singing sword

  ISBN 0-14-017049-9

  PS8595.H95S5 1994 C81354 C92-095682-3 PR9199.3.W59S5 1994

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out,

  or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar

  condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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's web site at www.penguta.es

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