Camulod Chronicles Book 8 - Clothar the Frank

by Whyte, Jack

  Unfortunately, it enabled us to take the cart to where we had no wish to go. Tristan shot a large hind in a dark, barely accessible spot at the base of a cliff late that afternoon, and after we had gutted and cleaned the carcass we experienced some difficulty in getting the meat to where we could transport it easily.

  Perceval took the measure of the cliff above us. It was perhaps as high as the height of five tall men standing on one another's shoulders, and he estimated—accurately, as it turned out—that we could save ourselves a great deal of grief by pulling the wagon to the edge of the cliff up there and lowering ropes by which we could haul up the meat.

  Everything proceeded smoothly until we were raising the last hindquarter of meat, when something startled one of the horses. The beast shied and its harness mate reacted in equal panic, leaping away from its companion as far as it could and causing the wheels of the cart to shift slightly. It was enough to cause Perceval to overbalance. He fell out of the cart and over the edge of the cliff, where he crashed solidly to the ground as all of us watched in horror, too stunned to move.

  He was alive and conscious, we knew, as we made our way down to him, because we could hear him cursing savagely, using language that one seldom heard coming from his lips. But his left leg was twisted violently up behind him so that it lay beneath his back.

  Fortunately, Tristan's days of service as a mercenary had exposed him to the harsh realities of military life, and now it appeared that he had learned how to deal with such things in the field. As soon as he reached his brother he knelt behind Perceval, ostensibly to support his back but in reality to conceal his hand as he undipped his large dagger from his belt and grasped it by the sheathed blade before bringing the heavy metal handle down solidly across the back of his brother's neck, knocking him unconscious on the instant.

  He wasted no time after that. Perceval's body slumped to the ground as Tristan shifted rapidly around towards his brother's legs. He grasped him about the waist, then squatted there above him, gulping in great breaths of air.

  "Right," he grunted. "I'm going to lift him as high as I can. You two take hold of his leg and pull it around to where it should lie naturally. Then pull it straight. Quickly now, and be careful but don't be timid. Haul back on that leg with all your strength and straighten it until the ends of the bone are back together, or as close as you can get them. If you don't do it properly the first time, he won't thank you later for attempting to be gentle! I don't know how long he'll stay unconscious, but he'll never be able to stand the pain of trying to straighten that leg out if he's awake, so on the count of three, I'll lift and you pull. Ready? Now, one, two, three!"

  Tristan thrust upwards with all the strength of his thighs and legs and managed to hoist his larger brother clear of the ground while Bors and I, not daring to look at each other or reflect upon what we were doing, seized the broken leg and pulled it around into its normal position, or as close to it as we could manage. The break appeared to be high on the thigh, and Perceval's breeches were doused with thick, fresh blood. The ends of his splintered bones grated audibly as I pulled on the leg, which was amazingly heavy, and my stomach lurched as nausea swept over me. Remembering what Tristan had told us to do, however, I gritted my teeth, fought down my revulsion and threw all of my weight backwards, pulling with all my strength until I felt the leg I was gripping flex and almost seem to stretch.

  "Do you have it?" Tristan's voice was close to breaking with the strain of holding up his brother's body, and as soon as he heard my affirmative shout he allowed Perceval to drop heavily. He spun around to look at what I had managed to achieve.

  "Good," he hissed. "That looks excellent. Bors! Quick as you can, break me two long boards from the tailgate of the cart—I need them to splint his leg. Be quick, and bring rope, too, the thinnest rope we have, to tie the boards in place. Move, now!"

  As Bors scuttled away to do his bidding, Tristan was already turning back to me, looking at my legs. "Yours are longer than mine. That's good, because I need to be doing other things. Sit here, and take his leg between your own. Lodge your left foot securely in his crotch, making sure his balls are on the outside of it." I wriggled myself into position. "Right, now wrap your right elbow around his foot—the left one—and lock it in place with your other hand. Get as strong a grip as possible. Good, that's good. Now here's what we're going to do. When I give you the word you're going to lean back, pulling against his leg as hard as you can and bracing yourself with that straight left leg of yours. You understand? What we're trying to do is stretch his leg . . . farther than it ought to be stretched." He scrambled away as he was speaking and took up a kneeling position ahead of me and on my right, facing his brother's broken leg. "What's happened is that the bone is splintered, like a tree struck by lightning, and the ends are too jagged to come together again on their own."

  He pulled out his dagger and slit his brother's woolen breeches lengthwise, peeling back the cut cloth to expose the flesh beneath it. The skin there, where it was not slick with blood, was white and pallid, and the flesh bulged out in an ugly swelling just below the point where jagged ends of bone protruded through the shredded flesh of the awful wound, which oozed blood sluggishly. Tristan kept talking to me, his eyes moving ceaselessly over the damages beneath his hands, and in a vain effort to keep my mind from dwelling on what I was looking at, I fought to concentrate upon the swirling, drifting snowflakes that filled the air around us, falling in utter silence, those of them that landed on Perceval's bared leg changing from white to crimson in an instant. Tristan was oblivious to the weather and the cold.

  "Well at least he hasn't severed any major bleeders. So, young Clothar, you are going to use every iota of your strength to pull that leg straight out until it's so long that the jagged bone ends pull apart from each other. Once you've done that, I'll guide the ends of the bones back into where they should be, and then we'll splint everything up and it'll be in the hands of God." He bellowed up to Bors, whom we could hear banging on the cart above our heads. "There's an axe in the toolbox by the driver's bench. Use it." He turned back to me. "Right, Perceval might be coming back to life at any moment, so let's get this over and done with, if we can. Are you ready?" I nodded that I was. "Good. Do it, then. Pull, and don't stop until I tell you to stop. Go!"

  I threw myself backwards, my eyes screwed tightly shut against all distractions as I concentrated upon keeping my body at full stretch, pulling at Perceval's leg, which felt heavy and lifeless. Once, twice, I felt as though something shifted and then I felt a lateral movement and heard Tristan grunt.

  "Right," he said. "That's it. You can stop pulling now. I can't do any more. That's as close as I can bring it to being where it was before."

  I relaxed and immediately felt myself on the verge of total collapse, exhausted by the effort I had been sustaining. Above our heads, Bors was now chopping hard, but even as I grew aware of that the noises stopped, and moments later we heard the sounds of him scrambling down to join us again. He brought four long, narrow boards with him, and a long coil of thin hempen rope.

  "I brought some water, too."

  "Good lad," Tristan said. "Do you have any clean cloth? I'll need one piece to wash his wound and another to use as a bandage."

  "I've got cloth," I said, remembering that I was wearing an extra tunic of plain white cloth beneath my quilted one, for additional warmth. I quickly stripped it off and shrugged back into my outer clothes before the cold could even penetrate. Tristan ripped it into two pieces, one much larger than the other, and used the smaller piece to wash away the blood that was now crusting on his brother's thigh. He used a corner of the larger piece to dry the skin, after which he folded the remainder into a pad that he placed directly over the wound, binding it in place with strips of the wet cloth. I had noticed that the bleeding had lessened perceptibly since Tristan's ministrations ended, and apparently that was a good thing, because Tristan mentioned it, too, in an approving murmur.

  He then splint
ed the leg, cutting the rope into lengths before calling on Bors and me to hold the boards in place along the limb while he tied them into place. He worked swiftly and with great confidence, and I was much impressed with his self-possession and the competence with which he had managed the entire affair, from the first moment of his looking at his brother, assessing the situation and what had to be done.

  "Where did you learn to do all that?" I asked when the last ties were in place and he sighed and slouched back against the bole of a tree.

  "Hmm. I didn't learn. I saw it done once, though, after an action against the Burgundians, not far south of Lutetia. One of our senior centurions, an old sweat called Lucius, fell into a ravine, from horseback. The situation was quite similar to this one, in fact, except that Lucius had an arrow in him, too. That's what caused him to fall in the first place. Anyway, an old friend of his, who had been a medic decades earlier, before becoming a centurion, knew what to do. I was in the situation you were in today, so I wasn't nearly as sure about what I needed me to do. But I remembered the old medic talking about how we needed to stretch the leg and bring the broken bone ends back together."

  "You've never done that before, ever?"

  Tristan heard the wonder in my voice and frowned slightly. "No, and I'd feel a lot better about it if my beloved brother there would just wake up, or grunt, or puke or something." He stooped forward and placed the flat of his hand against Perceval's brow. "Well, he's still breathing, at any rate, so I suppose there's nothing more for us to do but wait." He glanced up at the cliff above us and shook his head in rueful wonder. "I have absolutely no idea how we're ever going to get him out of here."

  "I have, sir."

  Both of us turned to look at Bors. He shrugged and held up both hands in a curiously helpless gesture.

  "I found a set of pulley blocks in the toolbox with the axe." He looked from one to the other of us, but when neither of us showed any reaction he continued. "There's no poles, but we have an axe and we're surrounded by trees, and we've lots and lots of rope."

  "So?" Tristan was clearly not understanding what Bors was telling him, and neither was I. "What are you talking about, Bors?"

  He blinked at us both in astonishment, and then he grew suddenly confident. "We can build a hoist, like the ones the sailors used to load the feed for our horses when we left Gaul. It only needs four stout poles, a few ropes and a set of pulleys, and we have all of those. Once it's assembled, we need simply strap Master Perceval to a board and hoist him up directly to the cart, straight up the face of the cliff."

  I remembered seeing the device he was describing, swinging heavy sacks from the wharf and delivering them safely to the ship's deck, but I had paid it no great amount of attention and now my memory of its workings was clouded, to say the least.

  "Straight up the face of the cliff. Can you build such a device, Bors?"

  He looked at me wide eyed. "Aye, sir, I can."

  "Where did you learn to do such a thing?"

  His face went blank with astonishment. "Nowhere, Master Clothar. I simply watched what the mariners did, and paid attention to the way the device worked. It was very simple. And then I remembered having seen a similar thing, but much larger, on my father's farm when I was a boy. One of the workers there, a foreman, taught me about pulleys and tackle and the way they work. He showed me how a single man can lift many times his own weight simply by using ropes threaded through pulleys."

  "And so you now believe you can build such a device and use it to haul Perceval to safety up there on the cliff top?"

  "Aye, sir, I do."

  "And the first step towards doing it is what? Cutting down four trees?"

  "Four, aye, Master."

  I looked at him one last time, setting my chin and pursing my lips before I spoke. "You are absolutely sure you can do this?"

  I saw the determination in his eyes. "Aye, Master, I'm sure."

  "Well, then, let's go and select our trees."

  Twenty-four hours after that—having found our trees and felled them, then dragged them close to the top of the cliff, cut them to size and harnessed them together to form a tripod and a hoisting arm—Tristan and I had learned how to thread a rope through a set of pulley blocks and how to set up a simple gin pole hoist.

  Perceval had regained consciousness about the time we set off to hunt for suitable trees, and he had been suffering unimaginable pain ever since, so that lines newly stamped into his face appeared to have been etched there years earlier. We fed him rich, blood- thickened venison broth spiced with wild garlic and onions that grew in profusion close by where we were camped at the cliff base, but he had little appetite, too badly in need of rest to care about eating and in too much pain to be capable of resting. By the time we had erected the hoist, however, he had lapsed into unconsciousness, and although that would make our task of raising him easier, it also worried us deeply. We strapped him securely to a stretcher made of wrist-thick sapling stems and raised him quickly, straight up the cliff as Bors had promised. Once we had him safely there, we transferred him to the bed of the cart, which we had loaded with dried bracken from the sheltered bottom of the cliff to cushion him as much as possible.

  By that time, however, it was growing dark, and after a hurried discussion, weighing the pros and contras of attempting to travel through unknown woodland in the dark of night, we decided we had no other choice but to remain where we were for another night and set off for Verulamium early in the morning. So we lit a cooking fire and set about cooking more of Tristan's venison, which we ate with the last of the bread we had brought with us.

  We retired early that night, looking to be astir and ready to move off before dawn broke, but I for one could find no rest, fretting over the health of our helpless friend. Bishop Enos had some wonderful healers and physicians among his priests, I knew, and I would not be satisfied until Perceval was safely delivered into their hands.

  9

  We arrived back in Verulamium before noon the next day, having been absent for five days, and we were traveling very slowly, painfully aware of the agonized sounds coming from the rear of the cart at every bump in the surface of the ground. Once within the town, however, it was the work of mere moments to deliver Perceval to the building that Bishop Enos had dedicated to permanent use as a hospital. There, a tall and gaunt old priest called Marcus, who had once served as a military surgeon with the legions in Africa before the invasion of the Vandals in 429, took Perceval off our hands and promised he would have the finest care anyone could have. Father Marcus stripped off the splints Tristan had applied and examined the work that we had done to repair the leg, and was lavish with his praise for Tristan. We were grateful to be able to leave our friend and brother in his care.

  I made my way directly to Bishop Enos's quarters to inform him of what had happened to Perceval, only to find that the Lady Demea was there, deep in conversation with the bishop. I slipped away without either of them having seen me and went outside, where I found young Maia sitting on a concrete water conduit, her long shadow stretched out before her, her slender feet bare in the gutter by the side of the road. She was completely unaware of my presence as I walked up behind her.

  "Maia," I said, "I'm not angry at you, so there's no need to run away from me."

  She jumped to her feet as I spoke and spun around to face me, her face flushing hotly, and after a few moments when she was plainly searching for words, she said, "I'm not afraid and I'm not running anywhere."

  "Good, I am glad to hear that, because I need to talk with you. I would like you to come by the basilica tomorrow when I am practicing with my spears and show me how you threw that one. I am not at all upset about that, I promise you. In fact the opposite is true. So will you do that? Mil you come tomorrow?"

  "I can't. I won't be here."

  "What do you mean? You won't come to the basilica?"

  She shrugged, her face regaining its normal color. "No, I mean I won't be here in Verulamium tomorrow. We are leavi
ng for home in the morning, returning to Chester."

  "You are? That's very sudden, isn't it? Why?"

  She shrugged her shoulders, the movement emphasizing how thin and insubstantial she appeared to be, and yet I knew she was as strong and lithe as a whip, despite the impression she conveyed of being like a young deer or a newborn foal, all eyes and long, unsteady legs. "Because the King and Queen's prayers have been answered," she replied. She spoke without inflection, and nothing in her demeanor indicated that she might hold any opinion of any kind on what she was reporting, but there was something impossibly subtle about her words that made me look at her more closely, wondering if there was really cynicism in her speech. She paid me no attention, however, and was already continuing. "Saint Alban has interceded in Heaven on their behalf and Queen Demea is now with child and so we must go home now. That is why I am here. I'm waiting for the Queen. She is talking with Bishop Enos."

  I continued to stare at her for the space of a few more heartbeats, then told myself not to be so silly. The child was only twelve, after all. That was a marriageable age, certainly, but only for rare unions between young girls and very old men whose mortality was questionable. It was no indicator of either womanhood or intellect. "I see," I said, nodding slowly. "Has she been there long, with the bishop?"

  "No, not long. Why?"

  "Oh, no reason. I'm sorry you are leaving so soon. I shall miss you."

  "I'm not. I can't wait to go home."

  "I don't suppose you would care to show me how you threw that spear right now, would you?"

  She cocked her head and looked at me strangely, her elfin face with its enormous piercing blue eyes unreadable. "Now? But you have no spears."