by Whyte, Jack
I saw Ursus stoop and pick something up, and then he came back towards me, gazing down at whatever it was he had found, then lobbing it towards me when he was close enough. I caught it and held it up to see it properly. It was the heel of a loaf of bread, just small enough to fill my palm and hard enough that I could clearly see the gnawed marks where someone had tried in vain to bite into it with strong teeth.
"It's still dry," Ursus said, standing now by my knee, "in this weather, save on the very outside. That means we can't be any more than a quarter of an hour behind the man who threw it away. There's an abandoned mansio about five miles ahead. They'll stop there for the night. Or at least, they ought to."
"Why there?"
"No other choice." He reached up with a bent finger and flicked a drop of rain from the end of his nose. The downpour suddenly intensified, the rain falling harder than ever, and I had to bend down towards him and listen closely to hear his voice above the thunder of it on my helmet, even though he was shouting at me. "They've no tents, remember? And it's too damn wet for them to even try to shelter under the trees." He moved even closer to me, leaning against my horse's side, his left hand holding my ankle as he shouted up at me and his face twisted into a rictus that I soon recognized, to my complete astonishment, as a grin. He was absolutely enjoying all of this, the journey, the chase and the deluge.
He removed his hand from my ankle and raised his voice even louder, wiping at his eyes with a forefinger. 'The mansio's old and it's been sitting empty for years, long before I was born. It's got no doors or windows but it's still standing, thanks to thick stone walls, and it has a roof, or most of a roof, and fireplaces. They'll be better off there than any other place between Lugdunum and Genava. They might not be completely dry, or completely warm, but they'll be out of the wind and the worst of the rain and they'll have firelight and a bit of heat. They could be far worse off."
"And what about—?" The rain slackened as quickly as it had increased, and I heard myself bellowing. I lowered my voice instantly, glancing about as though to see if anyone else had heard me. "What about us?"
"What about us?" He was standing sideways to me now, his hands on his hips so that his cloak hung tent-like from his extended elbows. "We'll cut away from the road here, ride around and get ahead of them. From then on, every mile we gain on them is worth at least six to us, because they'll be walking to catch up to us and we'll be flying on horseback. Once past them, we'll ride for ten more miles, then stop for the night at a place I know, where we'll be warm and drier than any of those poor fools."
"Ten miles, once we're past them? It will be dark by then, and probably still raining, which means there'll be no moon to light your way. How will you find this place you speak of? Is it on the road? What kind of place is it, anyway?"
"Nitter natter. Master, so many questions." Ursus grinned and swung himself up onto his mount, making nothing of the sodden weight of his cloak. "It's a shepherd's hut, built of stone, solid as bedrock and strongly thatched, and it is never without a supply of fine, dry firewood. And as for your other question, no, it's not on the road. It is four hundred paces off the road, as I remember, and I could find it blindfolded if I had to. But I won't have to. Come, let's go." He looked up at the sky, then kicked his horse into motion, angling it away from the road and towards the forest, shouting back over his shoulder as he went. "I would say we have two hours of daylight left to us, perhaps two and a half. That should be more time than we need to reach our spot without riding through darkness. Once past Beddoc's crew we can really travel quickly, since we won't have to worry about running into them." He kicked his horse again, pushing it to a canter, and I followed close behind him, shouting back at him.
"How do you know this place we're going to, and how do you know it's still there? When were you there last?"
He didn't look back but his voice drifted to me over his shoulder. "I saw it last three years ago. I know where it is because I was born near there. I know it is still there because it was built to endure forever. And I know that's true because the shepherd who built it was my grandfather. I helped him chink the walls while I was still a babe in my father's arms. And I know it's warm and dry and stocked with fuel because my brother Doran still uses it today, when his flocks are on that side of his lands." Now he looked back at me, laughing. "Have you any further questions, Master Clothar?"
I closed my mouth, which had gaped open in surprise at what he was telling me, and then laughed back at him, kicking my mount's flanks to bring it level with his, and we rode on through the downpour, out into the forest's edge where we could ride parallel to the road and pass our quarry by without fear of being seen.
It was dark within the confines of the forest, and although I knew the expectation was illogical, I felt it ought to have been drier, but this forest was all deciduous growth, so there was nothing but a thin screen of leaves preventing the driving, incessant rain from falling straight through the canopy to the ground. And so as we rode through the trees we found it worse in places than being out in the open air, facing the rain. Out there, at least, we would be able to tell where the attack was coming from and hunch ourselves against it. Here, in the shadows beneath the trees, depending on what we or our mounts brushed up against or disturbed in passing, we were constantly being caught unprepared by small deluges, and sometimes enormous ones, that crashed down on us from all directions, landing indiscriminately on our heads or on any other part of our bodies that happened to be in the way. I tried hard to empty my mind of anything other than picking my way forward through the undergrowth and remaining alert to the possibility, however unlikely it might be, that Beddoc might have sent out scouts in such weather to check the forest's edge for enemies.
Sooner than I had expected, Ursus held up his arm in a signal to halt, and I reined in close to where he sat staring off to his right, listening intently. I tilted my head to listen, too, only to wonder for possibly the hundredth time at the acuity of my companion's hearing. I could hear nothing but the hammering of rain on my helmet. The noise of it filled my entire world.
"What can you hear?" I asked him.
"Nothing, and that suits me well. We're close to the old mansio, but not too close. I'm going to take a look. You stay here."
He swung down from his saddle and went towards the road, and I could not believe how quickly he faded from my sight, obscured by the mist among the trees and the falling rain, the blackish green color of his heavy woolen cloak seeming to absorb the very air about it and rendering him invisible. I forced myself to sit patiently, waiting for him to return, and in a short time he did, looming up suddenly within paces of me, though I had been watching diligently for the first signs of his coming.
"They're there, settling in for the night about a quarter of a mile up ahead, and a miserable-looking crew they are. They won't all be able to fit beneath the roofed portion of the place, not by a long shot, so there will be a deal of squabbling over who gets to stay where and I imagine the people in charge of them will have a job keeping the peace. I managed to get close enough to hear a few things, but the only important thing was someone giving orders for a squad to come into the forest looking for firewood . . . dry firewood. They won't find any, not in this downpour, but that means they're going to search deep into the woods, trying to find a dry cache, so we had better make a wide loop just to be sure we avoid them. Let's go."
We struck off deep into the woods, and rode in a long semicircle for the better part of half an hour, until we were sure we had left the enemy night camp far behind us, and we came out onto the road again. From that point on, free of the need to worry about being seen, we traveled as quickly as our mounts could carry us. The daylight lasted long after we had expected it to fade, so that it was still not completely dark by the time Ursus reined in and led us off the road, along a narrow but clearly marked pathway that took us, as he had promised, to a dry and sturdy, draft-proof haven that was stocked with an ample supply of cut and split firewood, careful
ly piled beneath sheltering eaves that had been extended for that purpose. We had a fire going within minutes of arriving and we ate in comfort and then bedded down in the luxury of two narrow, hand- built cots, with our wet clothes hung and stretched out around the inner walls, steaming towards dryness in the heat from the fire.
I was almost asleep when Ursus spoke for the first time in nigh on half an hour, and his words snapped me back to wakefulness.
"Be prepared for anything tomorrow, Clothar, and expect it to be worse than anything you can imagine. You hear me?"
"Aye. But why would you say that?"
"Because that is the only way to go, as a thinking man. Going in expecting the very worst, anything you find that's less than that will appear to be welcome. We are about to be involved in a struggle, you and I—perhaps a civil war between brothers—whether we like it or no. The stakes are high enough to justify a war—a kingship and its power for the winner. I don't believe in auguries but I mislike the way things have fallen out these past few days. This brother of yours, Gunthar, sounds like a bad one to me. He does not strike me as the kind of man who'll be content to sit quietly back and run the risk of being deposed. Granted, he doesn't know yet that King Ban dispossessed him, or that he is dead, but he does know Ban was seriously wounded, and that in itself might have been enough to make him react according to his true nature.
"I hope I'm wrong and everything is well, but we'll find out the truth tomorrow, when we reach Genava. Sleep well, in the meantime, and hope the rain stops before dawn. At least we'll start out warm and dry in the morning, which is more than can be said for Beddoc's cattle."
BOOK TWO
Brothers and Cousins
GUNTHAR AND THEUDERIC
1
Gunthar's War. I have no idea why I still think of that squalid episode in those terms. It was Gunthar's, certainly; he brought it about and he was the dominant participant, but it was not a war. It never came close to being a war.
Wars have at least an illusion of grandeur and respectability attached to them; there is always the notion involved that, in a just war, some of the participants are motivated by high ideals and honourable intentions and that they fight to defend and protect something of value. Gunthar's War stirred no such thoughts. There was nothing noble or inspiring within its entire duration to stir the minds or imaginations of adventurous boys. The people ranged against Gunthar and his depravity, myself included, fought out of sheer terror and desperation, knowing that to do less, to refuse to fight, was to surrender their lives and their entire world to the dementia of a murderous degenerate. Gunthar's War was a morass of filth and wretchedness from beginning to end. Nothing good came out of it. It was a bloodbath of mindless slaughter and godless atrocities too foul for the ordinary mind to accommodate, and merely being involved in it was a disgusting experience, easily the bleakest and blackest part of my early manhood.
Even so, I came of age in the course of it, and I learned much about the ways of men, because it presented me a study in treachery and an object lesson in how one evil man can spawn corruption and perdition and thrust it on to other, better men. Gunthar's "War" was no more and no less than a vicious internecine squabble. It was born of greed, betrayal, duplicity and the lust for power, and it demeaned and came nigh to destroying everyone caught up in it.
We rode into it, literally, the morning following our night in the shepherd's hut.
I had been dreaming for years of the first view I would have of King Ban's castle after my lengthy absence, and I had seen every detail of the place clearly outlined in my memory, so that even in the pouring rain, which had not abated in the slightest overnight, I found myself almost laughably anxious as Ursus and I approached the brow of the last rise in the road that concealed the castle from our view. And then we were level with the top and I was gazing hungrily at the sight that awaited me, only to find that it was vastly different from what I remembered leaving behind me six years earlier.
An enormous ditch had been dug around the entire castle, and the excavated earth had been used to build a steeply sloping rampart on the far side, in front of the castle walls, which thus became a secondary line of defense rather than the primary one. The work had been done very recently, too. I could see that by the rawness of the logs that had been used to stabilize the slope of the earthen wall. It was a classical Roman fortification of vallum et fossam: an unscalable ramped wall of earth and clay excavated from, and used to back, a deep and dangerous protective ditch. The defenders were all but invulnerable, at the top of the sloping wall, where they could overlook and annihilate their attackers, who had to cross the exposed ditch and then fight their way up the steep clay face. In this instance, however, the effect of the fortification was doubly enhanced by the towering height of the castle walls that loomed behind the earthen one, for the stone battlements were more than twice as high again as the new ramparts at their foot, and the defenders up there could shoot down easily and without fear of counterattack into the mass of any attackers who might dare to attempt a crossing.
Ban's castle, I saw at a glance, was now invulnerable behind its new defenses, accessible only by an imposing and weighty drawbridge, which for the time being lay open, bridging the chasm of the ditch. Perhaps the assembled might of Empire would be able to bring Ban's castle down now, but even that was questionable. The fortress beside the lake had its own deep wells, ensuring an ample and permanent supply of fresh water for the garrison, and any successful attack against it must entail a prolonged land siege and a simultaneous naval blockade to prevent reprovisioning of the garrison from the lake side of the defenses. Anyone with any awareness of the logistics involved in such a venture knew too that the Empire no longer had such naval power at its ready disposal.
I was aware of Ursus sitting tall beside me, taking everything in.
"All that looks new," he said. "Must be for the Burgundians."
"Alamanni. Chulderic said the Alamanni were on the march."
"Aye, but didn't he say at the same time that the Burgundians were causing him more trouble than the Alamanni ever had? Whichever's right, he's gone to a power of trouble to deter one or both of them. I wouldn't like to be the attacking commander responsible for capturing that place now. Once that bridge goes up, there's no way of getting it down again if the defenders don't want you to."
I had been staring at the bridge as he spoke, having recognized it as a masterpiece of defensive engineering from earlier times, one of the great Roman drawbridges. I had heard of such devices from my tutors at the Bishop's School and had examined ancient drawings and plans for building them, but I had never seen a real one, and now I wondered who had designed and built this one.
Even from where we sat on the hill's crest gazing at it, and even through the drifting curtains of heavy rain, I could see that it was solid and massive, the bridge deck itself roughly thirty paces in length and fashioned of long, straight logs carefully selected for their uniform size and thickness. They had then been hand sawn, lengthwise, and squared so their sides would fit together, after which they had been covered with a layer of thick, heavy planking set crosswise and secured in place with heavy metal spikes. But that was merely the smallest and least important part of the construction. A drawbridge, no matter how soundly built the bridge deck might be, was completely useless if it could not be raised and lowered, and therein lay the challenge of construction. The end of the bridge on our side of the great ditch overlapped the edge of the excavation by several paces and fitted into a deep channel that had been carefully dug to accommodate its thickness and to bring its surface level with the ground. The far end, however, on the castle side, was very different.
The bridge deck there terminated a good ten paces, perhaps even fifteen paces beyond the edge of the ditch in what appeared to be a high, blank wall of stone, so that traffic crossing the ditch had to turn sharply right at that point, immediately veering again to enter the protection of the curtain wall that shielded the approach to the main
gates. Halfway between the edge of the ditch and the wall at the end of the bridge deck, however, a huge log, two long paces in diameter, had been carefully sunk across the approach and firmly anchored into the ground above the narrow edge of a long, deep pit, the high, vertical sides of which had been lined with logs to guard against subsidence. The pit had originally been dug as a sawpit for the dressing and shaping of the enormous matched logs that formed the foundation of the bridge deck, but it had been sited in that specific spot to serve another, more enduring purpose: the log across the end of the pit, between it and the ditch, was the fulcrum of the bridge, and the blank wall at the bridge end was merely the front surface of a massive counterweight that made it possible for the drawbridge to be raised and lowered with the help of an intricate system of windlasses and pulley hoists. The counterweight itself comprised several thick sheets of iron, hand riveted and bolted to the thick beams of the bridge deck's end and then surmounted with great squared blocks of solid granite that were secured to the metal plates in turn by welded straps of iron a handspan wide and a thumb's width thick. When the bridge was raised, the counter- weighted end sank into the pit. Twin towers of massive logs flanked the pit right and left and contained the system of giant windlasses and torsion brakes that enabled crews of men to raise and lower the bridge by means of pulleys and enormous chains of iron links.
