Camulod Chronicles Book 4 - The Saxon Shore

by Whyte, Jack

  Lucanus soon emerged as the magister of the small room in his Infirmary that we converted to a schoolroom, and he throve on the responsibility. He it was who taught them basic logic and philosophy, and his keen mind was stretched further than it had ever been, he often said, when he approached the matter of how to interest such young people in simple debate and elementary polemics. He also taught them mathematics—principally the boys, although little Octavia was smartest of them all in this—and the principles of engineering based upon the geometry of Euclid, which he himself had mastered as a boy. And he recruited his own outstanding pupil Ludmilla to teach them the basics of skeletal anatomy and simple medicine.

  Hector, Julia's husband and the father of Bedwyr, a councillor and an able administrator, worked with them one morning each alternate week to explain the elements of government, instructing them patiently, and with great success, on the way in which each of the various units and elements within our Colony—a working microcosm of all organised society—fed, and was in its turn dependent upon, the function of the others.

  On reading what I have just written, it appears to me I might have conveyed the impression that the children were subjected to an endless litany of disciplines, but that was not the case at all. Their lives were open and enjoyable and the knowledge they acquired was gathered across the span of years. Few of the subjects they studied were ever covered simultaneously and they had ample time for laughter and for simply being children. The lessons I had learned in that regard from Aunt Luceiia and from the writings and example of Publius Varrus were yet vibrant memories.

  Afternoons were for military studies and were the province of my brother Ambrose, assisted by me and by a wide range of willing volunteers. None of the boys was ever known to bewail that aspect of his learning and they learned all that we could teach them, which was much indeed.

  They learned first to ride, of course, and part of that instruction was the care and maintenance of all on which their horsemanship relied: their animals, their saddlery and their equipment. They learned to groom and feed their horses, in that order, and how to mend, repair and even fashion saddlery. And as their bodies grew and strengthened, they learned weaponry, from the care and use of swords, daggers and shields to the techniques of spear handling and bow craft. They learned tracking; how to read the signs of passage left by men and animals. They learned to hunt and fish and forage, and to find dry kindling in the worst of weathers, even under snow. They learned, too, the basic elements of drill and discipline for infantry and cavalry, marching and counter-marching, forming up and deploying alongside our regular troops, both infantry and cavalry.

  In years to come, Ambrose and I would teach them strategy and tactics, but in the meantime we fed their questing, eager minds with stories of adventure and of feats of arms and mighty victories. Arthur in particular was entranced by the tales of Alexander, whom men called The Great, and of his famed Companions, the noble warriors who campaigned, at their own expense, as bodyguards to the young Emperor from Macedonia seven hundred years ago and more. One day, enthralled by an account unheard before, he asked me how I came to know all this, and I told him of Uncle Varrus and his books. From that time on I would often find the boy, on rainy days, perched on a stool in the great Armoury where I had spent so much time in my youth, engrossed as I had been in Publius Varrus's accounts of days long past. And at such times I thought invariably about the gleaming sword that lay, its existence unsuspected, beneath the floor-boards at his feet. I was pleased, and more than pleased, with the boy's growth in every way. He was hungry, ravenous for knowledge, and he had the time to pursue it without disruption in his bright young life.

  That thought by itself should have stirred me towards caution, but I was blind to its implications, allowing myself to be lulled by uneventful days and balmy summer evenings. I had completely lost sight of the fact that anyone familiar with the ways of hunting birds, the eagle or the hawk, should always be aware that death and destruction can come swooping from a cloudless sky with the speed and impact of a falling stone.

  Never in my life, before or since that summer month of June in 440, have I been so unthinkingly careless of my duties for so long a time, and I have no excuse to offer for my dereliction other than that I was distracted by a haunting fear that peaked on the very day disaster struck. It was the most awful fear I have ever known, a crippling, dreadful burden of uncertainty and creeping terror against which I had fought so well and for so long that it was almost concealed from me in daylight, and I allowed myself to hide from it by the mere act of denying its existence. By night, however, the debilitating terror took on a life of its own that left me powerless to sleep or even to think with anything resembling clarity.

  Lucanus had grown concerned for me, I know, for he had asked me several times what ailed me, and upon my protest that I felt quite well he had held up a bronze mirror to my eyes, bidding me see how haggard I had grown. My other friends knew, too, that something was amiss, but I temporized by claiming that I could not sleep at night owing to an injury, a twisted back I had sustained mounting a skittish horse. They accepted that, but I know they all watched me closely.

  Then, on that terrible day, Lucanus held up another mirror to me, this time an abstract mirror of words, and all unknowing, forced me to confront my fears and make admission to myself.

  It was a hot afternoon of blazing sunshine, unseasonably so for June, and he and I were seated in the shady courtyard of the Infirmary, sipping cool wine and talking about the children and how much Arthur was growing to resemble Uther, the father whom the boy had never known. That led to a discussion of men and their physiology, and how resemblances were passed from parents to their offspring, the most startling example being my own resemblance to my half-brother Ambrose; two different mothers, yet two sons like beans from the same pod.

  "No." Lucanus shook his head then. "No," he repeated, quite clearly recalling something. "It's more than that, Caius, more than mere parentage, father to son. The most amazing likeness I have ever seen, apart from you and Ambrose, and one I had forgotten for many years until now, was between a young man and his mother's brother, who was much younger than she." He paused, remembering. "I said it was amazing, and it was. The son bore not the slightest resemblance to his father, for I met him, too, one time when he came visiting. It really was extraordinary, and I can hardly believe I had forgotten it. Phideas Arripas was the wife's brother's name, and he and I were students together in Alexandria, as was his nephew, who was no more than two years his junior. The two were as alike as you and Ambrose, and yet the resemblance sprang from Phideas's sister to her son. The son, by the way, was Mordechai Emancipatus."

  When Lucanus spoke that name it was as though the air about me darkened. My breath caught in my throat and my heart began to hammer loudly, as though it beat against my eardrums. Abruptly, I found myself on my feet, gazing about me wildly, aware of Lucanus's expression as he stared at me in astonishment. Blindly, gasping to control the sudden nausea that racked me, I lurched away, gesturing savagely to Luke to stay where he was.

  Somehow, probably because of the heat that kept most people in the coolness of their homes that afternoon, I made my way across the entire fort without attracting any more attention to myself, although I knew that I was reeling like a drunken man, and then I found myself inside the stables, where I sagged against a wall and removed my helmet. I felt better after that, but my guts were awash with churning fear. I sensed someone approaching, one of the duty troopers, and bent quickly to a trough, plunging my head beneath the cold water. The man, whoever he was, had passed on when I straightened again to gulp a breath, drenching my upper body with the water from my head. The single certainty within me was that I must leave this place at once and make my way to where I could be alone to scream aloud my grief and guilt and crawling horror. No thought was in my mind that I might fight, or ever overcome, the brutal, soul-destroying terror I could feel bludgeoning the crumbling edges of my sanity.


  I have no memory of saddling my horse, but as I drew myself into the saddle, the training of years somehow took precedence even over my consuming panic, preventing me from setting out defenceless. I rode directly to my day quarters in the Praetorium, our headquarters, and collected my bow and quiver. Then, as I mounted my horse again, I heard Lucanus call my name and felt his hand grasping at my ankle. Blinking my eyes clear and swallowing hard, I made myself turn and look down at him. He was distraught, his face taut with anxiety, and I knew, even in my despair, that I must say something to him.

  "Forgive me, old friend." One small, quite lucid part of me was amazed to hear how calm my voice sounded. "I am not myself. A sudden nausea. I thought a ride might clear my head. A long, hard ride. Don't be concerned for me. I'll come back soon, when I feel better, and you can try your magic arts on me."

  I wheeled my mount away and left him standing there in front of the headquarters building as I made my way out of the fort and down the hill and thence across the great campus that lay beneath, riding without awareness or volition, yet guiding my horse surely on the shortest route to the hidden valley that had been mine alone since childhood. It had been months since I had last been there, but Germanicus knew the way and brought me safely down the narrow, winding, bush-lined track among the enfolding hills to where my dead wife waited by the tiny lake, and there, by her graveside, I fell face down and wept, allowing all the horror I felt to engulf me.

  I had suspected my true condition for months, even while denying every sign of it and concealing it inside me from my very self. As soon as I had heard the name of Mordechai upon Lucanus's lips, however, all of my pretences and self-delusion had fallen away in the appalling recognition of what I had become. I was a leper! The certain knowledge filled me, making me want to scream my terror and revulsion and disgust to all the world. Leper! Unclean, condemned to banishment from all the world of men. Merlyn Britannicus, Leper!

  My sickness of the previous June, the weakness and the dreadful, scourging itch, had come again that winter, and even then I had denied the fear in me, fleeing into isolation in order to avoid the analytical, physician's eyes of Lucanus. He had tended me throughout the first phase of the sickness, to be sure, the fever and the draining weakness it entailed, but as soon as the fever had passed I had removed myself to here, in secrecy made possible only by the fact that Ambrose and Donuil, the only two who knew this place, were both away from Camulod at that time. Here, alone in my Avalon, I had borne the itchy, scaling ugliness of red and angry skin for eight whole days. This time, however, when the itch abated, the scaliness it caused remained, in patches, clear upon the skin above my waist, and lasted for weeks. Even after it had faded, however, I found flakes and patches of discomfort, not painful, and with no itch, but persistent.

  Now, as my tears dried, I sat erect and, talking distractedly all the time of slight, inconsequential things to my dead wife Cassandra, who lay beneath the ground close by my side, I unfastened and removed my armour and shrugged out of my tunic, stripping until I wore only my boots, and gazing down at myself almost abstractedly, searching my body for deliverance from the horror in my soul, hearing some tiny voice of sanity within my mind urging me to be calm and search with care, and to draw strength from what my eyes told me: my skin was clean and sound, my body whole, and the contagion that so threatened me lay in my mind alone, huddled among my other, twisted and obscene night fantasies. But my eyes went directly to the site of all my fears.

  The hair on my chest was blond and soft, approaching whiteness in its downy goldenness, but there was one patch, slightly larger than the first joint of my thumb and roughly circular in shape, that was pure white. Beneath it, faint yet noticeable, the skin around the edges of the area was pink, approaching redness, and the central area of skin was as white as the hair it bore. It seemed hardly significant, a small anomaly, but I had seen such marks before, on Mordechai's own chest. They were the early lesions of the foulest sickness known to man, the awful, lingering death-in-life called leprosy.

  I noticed some time later that my blood was still bright red and clean- looking as it oozed from the skin around my knife point, and only then did I realise what I had done. The wound in my breast was a fingersbreadth deep, the knife blade sharply angled to cut beneath the lesion and slip on between my ribs into my heart. And then I was on my feet again, throwing the dagger from me so that it splashed into the shallows of the lake, and I was drenched in chilling, icy sweat. So close had I come to ultimate despair! Terrified now with a different kind of fear, I sprang to my feet and shrugged into my tunic again, pulling it quickly over my head to cover my nakedness and ignoring the blood streaming from my chest. I then seized my bow and quiver without thought, and leapt up onto Germanicus. My feet found the stirrups by habit, and I sank my spurs cruelly into the horse, sending him surging forward in a bounding leap so that he took the pathway at the gallop, branches whipping wildly at my face and arms as we crashed up the hill. Once on the top, I rowelled him again, spurring him viciously as he thundered across the hillside, avoiding trees, bushes and scattered rocks at breakneck speed and keeping his feet beneath him only by the grace of God. For miles we rode that way, our pace unflagging, until I felt the great horse falter as he gained a crest and I knew that he would soon fall dead.

  Ashamed, and panting with exhaustion myself, I reined him to a halt and stripped the saddle from him, making a penance of the strength I used to groom him and to wipe him down, and hugging his great neck against my face until his laboured breathing and the trembling in his limbs had subsided. Then, after an age, when he was calm and breathing normally again, I led him down to water at a brook, after which I turned him free to graze, seating myself upon a fallen log and watching him with an ache inside my breast.

  Within the space of one short hour, I had come close to killing both myself and my horse. Self-loathing roiled inside me and I found myself despising my own weakness, for what was sickness, if not weakness?

  The blood on my chest had dried. I pulled my tunic off again and examined the wound. It had scabbed over, but when I probed it with a fingertip I felt nothing, and I recalled what Lucanus had said about the lesions. They were numb, incapable of registering sensations. I sighed and replaced my tunic, feeling dead inside, then led Germanicus back to where his saddle lay and harnessed him again.

  As I swung myself up to his back again, I heard the sound of distant hoofbeats, clear in the still air of the afternoon, drumming hard against the hillside far below, on the other side of the crest of the small hill on which I sat. I realised then that I had no idea where I was. I had paid no attention to the path we followed when we left the valley, riding blindly over hill and dale in my despair. Now, although I had no real interest other than dulled curiosity, and simply because it seemed the natural thing to do, I kicked Germanicus forward to the crest to see who had intruded upon my solitude.

  I recognised Shelagh immediately, though she was far distant and riding towards me through a screen of low bushes and small saplings. All riders have a personal style that makes them instantly recognisable to those who know them, and there was no mistaking Shelagh's. She was flat out, bent forward almost over her mount's ears, her long hair flying free behind her. My first reaction was pleasant surprise, but that was quickly followed by alarm. She was alone, and she should not have been. She had set out much earlier that day with Julia and Ludmilla and the children to go swimming in the wide and shallow river hole that was a favourite spot with all the youth of Camulod.

  The thought was not complete before I had put Germanicus to the slope, flying to intersect Shelagh's path. Then I saw her pursuers and reined him back again. There were two of them, on foot, bounding downwards towards her on an intersecting course from the crest of another hill, across from me. They had not yet seen me. My mind drew imaginary intersecting lines from them to her, and I realised that they would intercept her soon, before I could. Now I knew where I was, and how they could pursue her on foot, when she was
mounted. The path on which she rode was almost circular, making its way almost entirely around a low but steep-sided and densely treed hill between Camulod and the river. If they had seen her from the top of it, they would have had time to cut across in front of her, even on foot.

  As that thought occurred to me, one of the two stopped running and brought up a bow, and with a thrill of fright I recognised it as a Pendragon longbow. Even as I flung myself down from the saddle he loosed his shot and I watched it helplessly as it sped across the intervening distance and zipped between Shelagh's body and her horse's neck. Then, filled with flaring rage, I launched an arrow of my own and watched with satisfaction as it took the fellow squarely in the chest, sending him crashing on his back. His companion had seen none of this, intent upon reaching Shelagh's path and unaware that he was approaching me as well with every leaping step. I sighted on his chest and then, for no clear reason that I could define, shifted my aim and shot him in the groin, above and to the right of his genitals, piercing the socket where his thigh bone met his pelvis. He doubled over violently, crashing headlong downhill to land on his face, screaming in shock and pain. I shouted to Shelagh, calling her by name and jumping back up into my saddle. She reined in brutally, bringing her horse down onto his hindquarters and gaping at me in disbelief.

  Our meeting was constrained by shock on her part and bewildered incomprehension on mine, for now I saw that Shelagh wore no clothes other than a long, light cloak that failed utterly to conceal her body. She seemed completely unaware of her nakedness, however, and sat gazing at me wide- eyed until I reined in my horse beside her.