by Whyte, Jack
"Hmm," I grunted, thinking deeply about what we should do next. "Thank you, Philip Rider. Can you show me the shortest way to Camulod from here? And this damnable rain, does it ever stop?"
Philip flashed a smile. "Why, man, it seldom starts at all. It will blow by within the next day or two, and the weather will turn fine again before winter sets in, you wait and see. And as for the route to Camulod, that's easy. Simply follow this road south from here until you reach a garrisoned town called Ilchester. They're our people there, and they'll point you in the right direction. You should stay here, however, until our thousand pass you by. I'll leave a decurion with you to explain your presence to Commander Rufio, and after that you can proceed. Now, if you will permit me, I have to make up time and distance."
He slipped his helmet back onto his head and saluted me, bringing his clenched fist to his left breast, then turned his horse around and gave the signal to the men in front of him. In a matter of moments they had regrouped, leaving only one of their number with us, and were cantering away from us.
The decurion greeted us with a courteous nod and then sat silently beside us, and within a short time we heard the approaching cavalry squadrons. Their leaders, riding in the vanguard, drew rein on our side of the road as they neared us, and the decurion rode forward to explain our presence. They listened and nodded, then rode on by us with the decurion, nodding courteously but otherwise paying us no attention. When the last of the thousand had passed us by, their remounts, several hundreds in number, followed after them, herded by a large number of boys below fighting age, and we sat watching until the last of the animals had disappeared from view along the road behind the shrouds of falling rain.
Only then did Perceval turn to me with an admiring grunt. "I can't believe that the only thing in this god-forsaken country that I haven't hated on sight is one and a half thousand of the finest horses I've ever seen. Where do they find beasts like that? I can't believe they breed them here in such an unholy climate."
"Believe it," I told him. "They breed them all here now, according to Germanus, but their origins were Empire-wide. Let's be off. It's not far now to Camulod and I would like a roof over my head as soon as it can be arranged. I'll tell you what Germanus told me about their cavalry as we ride."
We kicked our horses into motion, and Perceval and Tristan ranged themselves on either side of me while young Bors rode close behind us, straining to hear.
I raised my voice until I was almost shouting over the noise of the rain. "The story goes that seventy-one years ago, in the year 376, in a place called Adrianopolis in Asia Minor beyond the eastern edges of the Middle Sea, a Roman consular army of forty thousand men, commanded by the Co-emperor Valens, was overrun and wiped out by a mounted force of Ostrogoths. It was a freakish accident and it should never have happened, but it did. The Goths were migrating from one region to another. They even had their women and children with them. But they were all mounted, on small, shaggy ponies, and they crested a mountain ridge to see an entire Roman army below them, marching in extended order along the edge of a lake. They charged immediately and caught the legions before they could form up in battle order, then rolled them up like a carpet. Forty thousand Romans died that afternoon, including Valens and his entire staff, and the word went out that the Romans were vulnerable to attack by massed formations of horsemen." I glanced from side to side and saw that both my friends were listening closely, so I kept talking.
"Theodosius was still Emperor at that time, and Flavius Stilicho, who was half Roman and half Vandal, was his most brilliant legatus. Stilicho had been appointed commander in chief of the Imperial Household Troops—in other words, commander in chief of all Rome's legions and the most powerful soldier in the world—at the age of twenty-two. They say he was the greatest natural military genius since Alexander the Great of Macedon. Anyway, Stilicho launched an immediate-priority program to re- equip and retrain all the legions of Rome in order to counteract this new threat of mounted attack, and within the space of twenty-five years he had increased each legion's cavalry strength from the traditional five percent of light, skirmishing cavalry— mounted archers whose sole duty was to form a mobile defensive screen while the legion was forming its battle lines—to twenty- five percent heavy, disciplined cavalry that operated in the manner of Alexander's heavy cavalry of six hundred years earlier, riding in tightly packed, disciplined formations and carrying heavy spears." I paused, allowing them to absorb what I had said before continuing. "Now that might not sound like much of a feat when you hear someone say it as quickly and plainly as I have just said it, but don't let that mislead you. Think about what was involved in those changes.
"It was an enormous undertaking, according to everything the bishop told me, and he had made a study of all it involved. That Stilicho was able to achieve such a transformation at all was astonishing, Germanus says, for he had first to confront and defeat the opinions and the plotting of the stubborn old-guard traditionalists who didn't want anything to change and who believed that the old ways would always be the best ways. And the fact that most of them resented him for his youth and his brilliance did not make his task any easier. Stilicho never quit, and eventually he won. But that he was able to achieve what he did within twenty-five short years was nothing short of miraculous."
I looked from one to the other of them and they stared back at me, waiting. "I know the bishop likes to talk of miracles and miraculous occurrences. He is a bishop, after all. But it really is astounding. Imagine, for a start, the sheer scope of the program that was required worldwide to breed the number of horses needed to equip every legion in the field with that many horses, including remounts and pack animals. Then think about the size of the animals involved. Light, skirmishing cavalry needed only small, light horses, and Rome had always had plenty of those. But for heavy cavalry you need big, heavy horses. Those they did not have, and they needed thousands of them. So where did they find them?
"I'll tell you where they came from. They created them, bred them out of what they had available. Once again, they launched a new, especially designed program all across the Empire. A cross-breeding program, to mate the largest, strongest animals they could find with the finest they had of lesser size, in order to breed larger offspring. By the end of twenty-five years, the results were astounding.
"But then they discovered, too, that the new 'heavy' cavalry, mounted on huge horses, was poorly equipped. They were armoured heavily on top, as Roman troops had always been, but now their legs were vulnerable, hanging down among the enemy on foot. So new armour had to be designed to protect the riders' legs, and new techniques for making it. And swords had to be lengthened and strengthened, for even the traditional cavalry spatha was too short to be effective from the back of a large, tall horse. And so a new study of metal crafting and smithing was launched to find new ways of working iron and steel to make longer, stronger weapons. It goes on and on, each problem giving rise to new solutions that led in turn to other problems in a never-ending cycle.
"Eventually, however, after only twenty years, in the period from 396 until 398, when Stilicho was Regent to the infant emperor Honorius, he brought the central corps of his new cavalry forces to train them here in Britain, in secrecy, against seaborne invasions of Picts, Saxons and Hibernian Scots. They were extremely successful." I paused, purely to emphasize the effect of my next words.
"Barely three years after that, however, when Stilicho had to summon the legions home in haste from Britain to defend Italia itself against invasion by Alaric and his Visigoths, they had to leave those cavalry mounts behind, simply because they lacked the means to take the animals with them. A man called Caius Britannicus, grandsire to Merlyn and the founder of the place now called Camulod, had become a friend to Flavius Stilicho during the Regent's campaign here. The Regent named this man legatus emeritus and granted him temporary ownership of all the abandoned Roman cavalry mounts, charging him with keeping them safe and secure pending the return of the legion
s to Britain. But the legions never returned, and those Roman horses became the foundation of the cavalry of Camulod and triggered the ascendancy of Merlyn's colony."
I fell silent then, and it felt as though I had been talking for a very long time, but neither of my companions made any comment on anything I had said. We proceeded for almost a mile before Tristan broke the silence.
"It has not stopped raining in seven days," he said. "Not once. I forget what the sky looks like without clouds. I can barely remember sunshine. I think we may die here in Britain, drowned in rainwater. Most of all, though, I'm longing for the warmth and dryness of that filthy old warehouse in Glevum. I think God must have forgotten we're here."
I was slightly stunned by the obliqueness of what he had said. And then it occurred to me that he had offered an apt comment on the importance of my impromptu history lesson and its relevance here and now. I nodded, accepting that, and glanced up at the sky.
"Sweet Jesus!" As the others swung to face me I pointed upwards. "Look!"
To the east, a golden beam of sunlight had sprung blazing, clean edged and brilliant from a narrow, bright blue gap in the clouds.
3
From that moment of seeing the first ray of sunshine breaking through the rain clouds, the entire land of Britain seemed to change its mind and welcome us, showing us warmth and beauty and hospitality where before we had known only dankness, gloom and despondency.
The memory of my first sight of the distant fortress of Camulod, sitting high on its wooded hill overlooking the rich and fertile plain beneath, has remained with me forever afterwards. Strangely enough, looking back upon it across the distance of years, I realize now that I did not think of it as a fortress at all when I first saw it. I saw Camulod from afar as a place of great and exciting beauty, rather than as a defensive bastion. I saw that the place had none of the grandeur or magnificence of the great castellated fortresses of Gaul, and in the years to come I would see many finer and stronger buildings and fortifications along the southeast coastline of Britain itself, the so-called Forts of the Saxon Shore, built by the Roman occupying forces hundreds of years earlier and abandoned when the legions left.
What I saw in the distance that first day, for reasons I have never known or sought to understand, was a symbol of hope and, most surprisingly in retrospect, of peace, because it had become obvious by the time we came within sight of Camulod that day that, despite what Philip had told us about being at peace, we were in a land fully prepared for war. There were parties of soldiers moving everywhere we looked, mainly cavalry but with a substantial leavening of infantry, and we were challenged constantly by people demanding to know who we were and what we were about. Fortunately, the fact that we were both well dressed and well mounted worked in our favour, for it quickly became apparent to us that the enemy, whoever they might be, went largely afoot and owned little of the sophisticated weaponry carried by the troopers of Camulod—that word, troopers, was a new one to me, but easy enough to understand. Close to the hilltop fort itself, at the bottom of the winding road that swept up to the main gates concealed behind the curtain wall, a vast training ground of hard-packed earth that showed no single blade of grass was filled to apparent capacity with wheeling, constantly moving groups of training troopers.
That close to the castle walls, no one paid us any attention and we mounted all the way to the main gates before we were challenged again, this time by the senior member of a vigilant band of guards who stood before the gates, eyeing everyone who came and went and from time to time questioning anyone who excited their curiosity or caution. I remained mounted and stated our business, saying that I knew Merlyn Britannicus was not available, but asking to meet with someone who could speak on his behalf.
That someone turned out to be a giant of a man, perhaps twice my own age, who strode out from the gates some time later and stood looking down at us without speaking, his arms crossed upon his enormously broad chest as he examined each of us from head to foot. The guards had told us to dismount while we were waiting for this fellow to be summoned, and now that he had come I found myself wishing I had remained on horseback. Even unarmored and wearing only a simple tunic, this man was hugely tall and physically intimidating, even larger and stronger looking than my cousin Brach, the biggest, most muscular and imposing man I had ever known.
He made no effort to speak to us at first, more concerned with assessing any threat that we might represent to him or to his people. His eyes moved over each of us meticulously, missing nothing and even examining the harness and trappings of our horses. Finally, however, he seemed satisfied and nodded very slightly, the set of his shoulders relaxing visibly. He introduced himself, in a voice that was pleasantly deep and surprisingly gentle, as Donuil Mac Athol, adjutant to Merlyn Britannicus. He spoke in Latin, as did we all, but with an intonation I had never heard before. Knowing him to be a local of some description merely from his name—Mac Athol meant son of Athol in the Gallic tongue—I assumed he was a northerner, from the mountains, perhaps a Cambrian. It transpired that I was wrong. He was a Scot, from the island of Hibernia across the western sea, but I would not learn that until later.
I had said nothing to him until then and had no way of knowing whether he had been told who we were or what we wanted with Merlyn, but he addressed me first, ignoring my two older companions.
"You come from Auxerre? From Germanus?" I nodded. "Well, I hope there's no great urgency to your mission. Merlyn is gone, where and for how long no one knows, not even my wife, and that's a wonder, for she knows everything. Tell me your names."
I introduced myself first, and then Perceval, Tristan and Bors. Donuil's eyes moved to each person as I said their names, and when I had finished he nodded again.
"Good, then. Perceval, Tristan and young Bors. Be welcome in Camulod. Come inside now and we'll find someone to look after your things for you, your gear and your horses . . . although I imagine you, young fellow, will want to stay with your beasts and make sure no one touches anything without your say so, am I right?" When Bors nodded, Donuil grinned in response. "Aye, I'd have been disappointed had you said otherwise. So be it. We'll come back and find you in a while. But you three, are you thirsty? We have some fine brewers of beer here in Camulod. Come you and let's see if we can find some of their best."
After dinner that night, on what was merely the first of many long, pleasant evenings by the fire in the quarters belonging to Donuil and his lustrous and beautiful wife, Shelagh, we received our first lessons in the intimate family tale of the development of Camulod and the two families, Britannicus and Varrus, that had brought it into being and shaped it into the self-contained and practically self-sufficient society it had become.
We talked about Bishop Enos, too, and about the mission I had been charged with regarding him. I now believed that I must talk to Enos without delay. No one in Camulod knew how or where to find Merlyn, but my experiences at the Bishop's School had taught me that few organizations were more adept and well qualified at communicating among themselves and finding people than was the Church itself. Bishop Enos had work to do, both with and for Merlyn, on behalf of his friend and colleague Germanus of Auxerre, and I, too, had information to communicate to Merlyn. It seemed to me there was a far better chance of reaching him through Verulamium and the ecclesiastical contacts of Bishop Enos than there was of finding him through the offices of anyone in Camulod.
Donuil listened to all this, impatiently I thought, and would have demurred had not his wife forestalled him, agreeing with my viewpoint. After that—and it was plain that the giant Donuil had not the slightest desire to challenge Shelagh's judgment—the only objection he could think to raise was that Enos might not be in Verulamium when we arrived there.
"I prefer the odds on that gamble," I told him. "Even if Enos isn't there when we arrive, chances are he won't be far away. Verulamium's not merely his home, it's the center of his activities. As the bishop there, it's unlikely he would stay away too long. His dut
ies and responsibilities depend too much upon his being there most of the time. Over in Gaul Germanus seems to be forever traveling, but he is seldom absent from his bishopric in Auxerre for more than a few weeks at a time, even although he has an entire staff at his disposal because his territory is a lot bigger and broader than is Enos's."
By the end of that visit we had agreed that my friends and I should continue our journey without delay, heading north and west, following the route Merlyn himself had taken with his party at various times on the way to, and back from, Verulamium. Donuil would provide us with all the instructions we would need to find the town itself, and he generously offered us an escort of Camulodian troopers. We declined that, at first, believing, rightly or wrongly, that we would be less conspicuous traveling as a small group, but Donuil and Shelagh were both adamantly opposed to our going unescorted. We had no notions of the dangers we might have to face, they told us, reiterating their warnings until we threw up our hands and complied with their wishes.
I asked them then about the assistance we had been assured we would find provided by Cuthric and Cayena, influential Anglian leaders that Germanus had told me about. Husband and wife, they were Christians of long standing and had established themselves and their people widely in the lands surrounding and to the south and west of Enos's seat of Verulamium. Cuthric was what Germanus termed both a sage and a mage—a wise man and a devout Christian by nature and education, but also a man learned in the mysteries and esoterica of his people's ancient beliefs and rituals. Cuthric was accorded great respect and honour by his people, and his wife, Cayena, was the perfect consort to his presence. Even Merlyn and his party, Germanus had told me, had accepted the couple's beneficent influence on the Anglian community, and the fact that Merlyn and the forces of Camulod would recognize such people as a community rather than a nest of invading Outlanders went a long way towards explaining the kind of people these newcomers must be.
