by Whyte, Jack
AKA – The Lance Thrower
Also by Jack Whyte
A DREAM OF EAGLES
The Skystone
The Singing Sword
The Eagles' Brood
The Saxon Shore
The Sorcerer Volume I: The Fort at River's Bend
The Sorcerer Volume II: Metamorphosis
Uther
Eagle
AKA
The Lance Thrower
JACK WHYTE
PENGUIN CANADA Published by the Penguin Group
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First published in a Viking Canada hardcover by Penguin Group (Canada),
a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc., 2003 Published in this edition, 2004
(OPM) 10 987654321
Copyright © Jack Whyte, 2003
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Publisher's note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Manufactured in the United States of America.
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Whyte, Jack, 1940-
Clothar the Frank / Jack Whyte.
ISBN 0-14-028648-9
1. Lancelot (Legendary character)—Fiction. I. Title. PS8595.H947C56 2004 C813'.54 C2004-904577-6
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To my wife, Beverley
AUTHOR'S NOTE
In approaching this story, I was forced to come to terms with a few historical realities that bore heavily upon my vision of how the legend of King Arthur came into existence. In my mind, the entire story revolves around the Arthur/Guinivere/Lancelot triangle, and everything that occurs in the legendary tale is attributable to the humanity—and the human weaknesses—of the King himself, the dysfunctional nature of his marriage to Guinivere and their joint attraction to the brilliant foreign warrior known as Lancelot.
But there's the rub: Lancelot of the Lake, Lancelot du lac, is a French name, and Lancelot himself, the legend tells us, was a French knight who crossed the sea to England expressly to serve as a Knight of the Round Table at King Arthur's Court. Well, even making allowances for legendary exaggeration, that simply could not have happened in the middle of the fifth century, because in those days England was still called Britannia and what we call France today was still Roman Gaul.
It would not be until at least a century later, when the Anglo- Saxon invasions of Britain finally came to an end with the tribes called the Angles emerging as the dominant force, that the country would begin to become known as the land of the Angles—Angle land, and eventually England. By the same token, Roman Gaul would not become known as France until much later, when the invading Franks finally established their dominance over their arch- rivals, the Burgundians. Over time, the Frankish territories became the land of the Franks—France—while the Burgundians remained in their own territories of Burgundy.
Reputedly wonderful horsemen, the Franks are the people generally credited with bringing the stirruped saddle to western Europe, and from the time of their first appearance in the Roman Empire, along the Rhine River in the third century, they had a reputation for being blunt spoken and utterly tactless, probably because their original tongue contained few of the subtleties of Latin or Greek. Be that as it may, we still use the term "speaking frankly" to denote directness and an unwillingness to mince one's words. There were two main tribal branches of Franks: the Salian Franks lived in what is now northern France, Belgium and the Netherlands, and the Ripuarians lived in the southwest of France and in what is now Switzerland.
Clothar is my interpretation of Lancelot. Academic opinion indicates that the name Lancelot probably developed from the Latin word lancearius, a Roman military denomination that was probably similar to the European lancer regiments of the nineteenth century. In Clothar himself, I have posited a Frankish horse warrior who comes to Britain, befriends the High King and earns himself an undying reputation as an archetypal hero, the character who will be called Lancelot centuries later by French storytellers who have heard of his fame and his exploits but have lost awareness of his real name.
The Names
It was an anomaly of Roman society that the names given to children appear to us to be relatively unimportant, but it is true that many children were named simply according to the order of their birth. The first three or four sons of a family might be called Gaius, or Caius, Marcus or Paulus, but the fifth son was likely to be Quintus, which means fifth, and thereafter, in large families, would come Sextus and Septimus or Septimius (sixth and seventh). Octavius Caesar, who would name himself Caesar Augustus, was the eighth son of his parents.
Roman place-names give us problems today, too, because they are Latin names and the modern cities that have replaced the Roman originals all have different names. For the sake of authenticity in a story like this, however, it would be jarring and unnatural to use the modern place-names, and so I have supplied a list below of the most important place-names in this story, along with their modern equivalents. The most obvious and enlightening example of this usage is the Roman fort at Lutetia in Gaul. It was built during the Gallic Wars of Julius Caesar, and its sole purpose, situated as it was on a crucial river ford, was to keep a lid on the warlike activities of the local tribesmen, a clan called the Parisii. That fort, Lutetia, has since grown to become the city of Paris.
Roman Name
Modern Name
Autessiodurum
Auxerre
Carcasso
Carcassonne
Cenabum
Orleans
Dubris
Dover
Genava
Geneva
Gesoriacum
Le Havre
Glevum
Gloucester
Lugdunum
Lyons
Lutetia
Paris
Massilia
Marseille
Treves
Troyes
Verulamium
St. Alban's
Language
The major difficulty an author faces in writing historical fiction is that of language, because language is constantly evolving and we have no real knowledge of how people spoke and sounded, in any language, hundreds of years ago. I have chosen to write in standard English, but even that is a relatively new development, since the language was only "standardized" in the nineteenth century. Until that time, there was no orthographically correct way to spell anything.
Most of the characters in my stories would have spoken in the ancient Celtic, Germanic and Gallic tongues, while the better educated, Romanized characters, like Bishop Germanus and his associates, and even Clothar as a student at the Bishop's School, would most probably have conversed in Latin. When people of mixed tongues met and mingled, they would have spoken the lingua franca of their time, although the real lingua franca—literally the language of the Franks—had not yet come into common use. But throughout history, whenever people of diverse tongues and races have come together to trade, human ingenuity has quickly developed basic, fundamental languages to fit their needs. In Africa, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that language was Swahili. In Oriental Asia, it was Pidgin. We do not know the name of whatever trading language was dominant in fifth-century Europe, but I have chosen to call it the Coastal Tongue, because the coast was the interface point for most traders.
Many terms and expressions used in this story, however, have no modern equivalent, and others sound modem and up-to-date when in fact they are genuinely ancient. I have addressed a few of these in the notes that follow here. Modern readers are sometimes surprised, for example, to find the title Duke being used in the ancient world, but the word originally sprang from the Roman army, where a man who had distinguished himself by demonstrating spectacular heroism and leadership could earn himself the title of dux, which is the Latin word for a leader, a man who is foremost among his companions, and out of that title came the English title of Duke.
In much the same way, people in North America today tend to feel proprietorial about nouns like corn and bannock, not realizing that corn has always been the generic Old World term for any kind of grain and that bannock—the simplest form of unleavened bread—is common to every primitive society, no matter what they call it. The Celtic clans of Scotland and Ireland have always called it bannock, and it was their use of the name that the aboriginal peoples of America adopted. The plant Americans call com, on the other hand, is known as maize in Europe, where it is a coarse, mealy grain fed to cattle. American sweet corn came to be known in Europe only during and after the Second World War.
Another problematic word for us is mile. A modern mile is 1,760 yards, or approximately 1,500 meters, whereas the Latin word mille meant a thousand, and a Roman mile was one thousand paces long. Bearing in mind that the average Old World Roman was less than five foot six inches tall, their marching pace would have been short, probably in the range of twenty-six to twenty-nine inches, making their mile shorter than a modern kilometer.
And then there are the latifundiae. Few people today have any concept of how highly organized, and even industrialized, the Roman Empire was sixteen and seventeen hundred years ago. The Romans had a thriving stock market and a highly refined and regulated real-estate industry, and the food production and distribution system they constructed to feed their citizenry, founded upon a system of enormous ranches and collective farms called latifundiae, was extremely sophisticated even by today's standards. These private enterprises, run by corporations and funded and owned by investors, produced grain, cattle, wines, fruits and vegetables and other commodities in vast amounts for shipment to markets throughout the Empire.
The Latin word magister, which gives us our modern words magistrate and magisterial, was in common use in the Roman army in the fifth century. It appears to have had two levels of meaning, and I have used it in both senses throughout this book. The first of these was the literal use, where a student or pupil would refer to his teacher or mentor as Magister (Master), with all appropriate deference. The second usage, however, resembled the way we today use the term Boss, denoting a superior whose title entails the accordance of a degree of respect but falls far short of the subservience suggested by the use of the word Master.
Similarly, the word ecclesia gives us our modern word ecclesiastical, but the original meaning of the word was a church, particularly a permanent church, built of stone.
Citrus wood is well documented as being the most precious wood in the Ancient World, but we have no idea what it was like. No trace of it survives. It is one of the earliest known instances of a precious commodity being exploited to extinction.
And finally, a word about horse troopers. Roman cavalry units were traditionally organized into turmae (squadrons) and alae (battalions). There were thirty to forty men in a turma (the singular form of turmae), and the strength of the alae ranged anywhere from sixteen to twenty-four turmae, which meant that a cavalry battalion could number between 480 and 960 men. The contus, a substantial, two-handed cavalry spear, was the weapon of many heavy cavalry turmae, and those troops were known, in turn, as contus cavalry.
PROLOGUE
I saw the bird lying in a pool of sunlight as soon as I came into the room. It was in the far corner over by the fireplace I built when I first came here a score and more years ago. I recognized its still form and felt immediate regret as I realized why its familiar song had been missing from my bedchamber that morning. The brightness of the pool of light in which it lay told me what had happened: the bird had flown in through the window and then, blinded in the sudden darkness of the room, had dashed itself against a wall and died.
It was a blackbird, a tiny, glossy creature whose only other color was its brilliant orange beak. As I bent over it and peered at the forlorn way one of its wings lay spread on the stone floor, the thought came to me that nothing about this little being gave any hint of the miraculous power and volume of pure song contained within its fragile frame. When this bird sang, men could hear it from miles away on quiet summer evenings. Its voice, its song and its magical power transcended and confounded the physical smallness of the singer.
I crouched cautiously, aware of the brittleness of my aging knees, and picked the dead bird up, cradling it in my hand and folding its already stiffening wings, noting the way the tiny head lolled on its broken neck. So small it was, and yet such a great loss to me in my early-morning awakenings and to everyone else whom its song reached. A blackbird—a merle, to the local Franks—a voice of purity and immense beauty, silenced forever. And then merely thinking of its Frankish name, another, heavier wave of grief swept over me without warning; connections and associations swarmed in my mind, and my eyes were all at once awash with tears. I drew myself erect and inhaled a great, deep breath to steady myself, reaching out to lean on the stone breast of the fireplace, and then I wiped my eyes with my sleeve and looked about me at this bare room that holds so many memories and uncompleted tasks.
We have no need of open indoor fires here in the warmth of southern Gaul, but when I first came to these parts many years ago, my mind was filled with memories of long, pleasant nights spent in another land far to the northwest, sprawled in comfortable chairs before a roaring fire set into a stone-built chimneyed hearth, and so I indulged myself and built such a hearth here, in my new home. Once I had built it, of course, reality asserted itself, and to my wife's gentle amusement the fire was seldom lit. But I would often sit for hours in front of the silent hearth in the long autumn evenings, gazing into the dried logs and dreaming of things gone, and as time passed the habit endured while the memory of warm firelight faded. Since my wife died, I have been the sole user of this room, and I have lit the fire four times, purely for the pleasure of gazing into the heart of flames and interpreting the pictures I imagined I saw there. Today would have been the fifth occasion, had I not found the bird.
Moments after I had picked the small corpse up, I
found myself outside, scraping a shallow hole with my heel in the grass beneath the window, then kneeling to use my dagger to deepen the hole into a grave. I buried the blackbird there, refusing to ask myself why I should be doing such a thing, and then I returned directly here and dragged this heavy table to the window, after which I sat down to write for the first time in years. And here I am, writing about a dead songbird and the memories it brought back to me.
Ten years ago, a full year after the death of my beloved wife, and prompted by an urging I could not deny, I made the saddest journey of my life, although at the start of it I thought nothing could surpass the sadness I had known throughout my later years. I laid aside my rich clothing and dressed myself as an ordinary, undistinguished man, then made my way, in a strong, tight boat that belonged to an old and honored friend, across the narrow seas to Britain.
I did not go alone. That would have been extreme folly for a man of my age, even although I refuse to consider myself old. Besides, those who love and care for me had quickly decided, upon hearing what I had in mind, that I must be mad to think to risk my life upon the seas and journey to a land notorious for its savage people and their alien ways. They thought at first to prevent me somehow from going at all, but then, seeing I was determined to go despite them, they insisted that I travel with an escort. So I selected the youngest of my three sons, Clovis, and nine of his closest friends and companions to accompany me. These were all young warriors, still unwed and approaching their prime, and armed with the finest weapons our armorers could make—long-bladed swords and axes of the finest tempered iron—so that no one could have denied that they were the best protection I could have. And thus accompanied, I set out for Britain with the tolerance, if not the unstinted blessings, of my advisers.
