by Whyte, Jack
In sleeping and in waking dreams Ironhair's face was never absent from my mind for longer than it took me to complete one minor task and turn towards another. I would discuss some strategy or other with my officers—for I had no friends at that time, and dealt with people strictly on the dictates and requirements of the moment—and then would turn to walk or ride away, and there would be Ironhair, the creator of my despair, grinning at me in my mind. I saw him always as he had been in Camulod, before we threw him out: an open faced, attractive, smiling man with the suggestion of goodwill and fellowship ever about him. His face, clearly recalled in every detail, came to be more familiar to me than my own, which I saw but seldom in those days. Even in sleep he was with me, and he was everyone I dreamed of. Each solitary night I was startled awake as his face appeared on Tressa's, Ded's and even Arthur's shoulders. Lucanus came to me in dreams, to talk, but even he never failed to become Ironhair, mocking me with his smile.
I have said that in those days I had no friends; that is both true and false. My friends stood by me—Donuil and Shelagh, Benedict and Falvo, Philip and faithful Rufio—but I abjured them and avoided them, cutting them cruelly with coldness and indifference whenever they sought my company and treating them as mere subordinates when I had to deal with them in government or war. They bore it stoically, knowing whence it came, but nowadays, when I think back to how I was, I sense their pain and loss, which must have seemed to them as bitter and unwelcome as my own.
It passed, in time, that dreadful misery, but I was never able to recapture the easy intimacy I had known with all of them; I had progressed by then from being simple Merlyn, trusted companion, brother-in-arms and laughing friend, to being Merlyn the predator, the avenger and the sorcerer.
A year, lost to me save for minor, insubstantial memories, as surely as the two years when I lived as someone else; and a lifetime, forfeited in payment for a dream of vengeance.
It began on that steep path above the gulf that swallow: Tress.
The morning sun rose in a cloudless sky that revealed no trace of the killing storm and found us huddled still in sleep, seven chilled and agued bodies shuddering in soaked clothes and huddled together for warmth in a single mast like nested spoons in a field kitchen case. Someone, I guessed Benedict, since he lay on the outside, had covered} the sleeping mass of us with cloaks and bedroll blankets and layered leather tents in an attempt to conserve our body; heat. Shelagh lay pressed against my back when I awoke,; her arms about my waist hugging me tightly, and I, in turn, was clutching the trooper Rufus. When the first of us awoke the others followed, and I remember feeling every ache and pain of all my forty plus years as I rolled free of our makeshift bedding, shivering from the chill of the morning and the dragging dankness of my cold, wet clothing.
We broke our fast briefly and in silence, eating without awareness from the rations left in one of the remaining saddlebags, and then we began searching for our friends. The abyss that had seemed so deep and dark in the storm; the previous night turned out to be nothing so enormous. At its deepest point, it was less than a score of paces, vertically, from the path above. Its bottom, however, was littered with loose boulders that had long since fallen from the cliff face and were now hidden by scrub and bushes. The sapling from which I had hung—my greave was still in place, lodged in the dirt at its base—had suspended me no more than my own height again above the ground, sufficient to have killed me, had I fallen down head first, but nothing resembling the depth I had imagined to be under me as I swung there. There, too, below and to the left, his lower body twisted in a shallow pit and his torso partially hidden by a tree trunk, we found Bedwyr, unconscious but alive, his left leg broken beneath him, a splintered length of bone protruding from his thigh. We left Rufus and Marco, the medical orderly attached to our troop, to straighten and splint the broken limb while Bedwyr was still unconscious and then to extract him from the pit in which he lay. The rest of us went looking for the others who had fallen.
Tressa had died beneath the weight of a falling horse— not her own, which lay several paces away, but mine, the beautiful big black gelding that she had called Bucephalus. Tress lay seemingly asleep on her back, her face at peace though tinged with the faintest shade of blue. Her helmet was still in place, covering her lustrous hair so that she looked more like a sleeping boy than a woman. Her lower body, however, from the rib cage downward, lay entirely concealed by the enormous bulk of the black horse's massive hindquarters, which were covered in blood and offal from its ruptured abdomen. She had been right, I thought as I stood gazing down at her. The creature had been aptly named. I remembered how she had teased me in bed, on the evening of the day I changed his name. She had preferred Bucephalus to old, mundane Germanicus, she said; Bucephalus had dignitas, the rolling majesty of a magnificent, historic name. My response had been to gather her into my arms and mount her, laughingly telling her that Bucephalus had killed the most wondrous man in all the world of his day, throwing him from a cliff, and I had challenged her to throw me from her saddle with such ease. But she had had no wish to unhorse me that night, and Bucephalus had been forgotten as we rode together, repetitively seeking the temporary little death to which we both knew she could always throw me. And now another Bucephalus had killed the most wondrous woman in my world.
It took us half a day to bring down the horses and haul the big black's hulk away from Tressa, and then to bury her I found a sheltered spot for her, between two spines of rock some way below the place where she had died, and by myself I dug the shallow pit that would hold her, loosening the earth with my sword and scraping it away with my remaining greave. When I could dig no deeper, I laid her gently in the stony grave and packed her body carefully in the earth I had removed, leaving her beautiful face free of dirt. That done, I placed two slanting slabs of stone over her head, angling them so that they would form a roof above her face, and then I placed a multitude of rocks over the mound that marked her resting place, piling them with great! care so that they fit together and would yield to no marauding wolf or bear. For hours I toiled at that, travelling farther each time in my search for stones till all the grass and earth | around was trampled flat and her funeral place was covered] by a chest high pyramid. Only then did I stop, feeling the laboured ache within my chest threaten to overcome me.
While I had been employed in that, the others had been similarly busy, above me, piling rocks over the three troopers who had met their deaths beside my Tress on that treacherous chute. Gunnar, Casso and Secundus, their names had been. I had known them all as casually as any leader knows his men, but I had not loved them.
As I climbed back up the steep slope beside the path, Donuil came forward to greet me, holding out his hand to help me clamber up the last short distance. But as I took his hand, his face changed into Ironhair's, and I leaned back and pulled him, hard, attempting to throw him out and over, above my head. Thank God he had already braced himself to take my weight, but even so, I almost succeeded in dislodging him, so great was his surprise. He grunted, frowned and then heaved, pulling me up onto the path and then pushing me aside. I know I was demented, and he told me afterwards that he had seen it in my eyes. The moment passed and I stood there, shaking my head as he asked me what was wrong.
We came to Camulod days later, bearing Bedwyr on a litter made out of leather tents slung between two long poles cut from tall, straight saplings and carried between two horses, front and rear. I have no recollection of the journey, or of our arrival.
My first awareness of being home again came when I opened my eyes in the sudarium, the steam room of the fort's bathhouse. I was sitting up, and had been talking, apparently, to Benedict, who sat across from me. I was instantly assailed by a kind of vertigo, with images springing to my mind of similar awakenings, years before when I had lost my memories of myself. Benedict leaned towards me quickly, his face creased with concern, asking if I was well. I nodded that I was and decided then and there to say nothing of my loss of awareness. He c
ontinued to eye me uneasily, nevertheless, but the moment passed without further comment.
My clothes, when I located them, were clean, and different from the clothing I had worn out on the road, so I knew I had been home long enough, at least, to have changed them. I went in search of Dedalus, hoping to pick his brains without betraying myself, and had gone half the way across the yard before I remembered seeing him fly from his horse and crash to the ground. Dedalus was dead. Again the vertigo swept over me, and I moved slowly to the nearest wall to lean against the stones, feeling the nausea churning in my gut. I vomited, explosively, but felt no better for it, and then all at once I was down on my knees and falling forward I awoke again with Ludmilla and Shelagh hovering over me. When they saw my open eyes, Ludmilla bent and placed a cool, soft hand across my brow.
"You have had a fever, Caius, and have made us all afraid for you, these past few days. Now lie still until I bring Mucius. Shelagh will stay with you."
When Ludmilla had gone, I tried to turn to Shelagh, but I could not move my head, and panic flared in me. My thoughts leaped back to the time of my earlier injury, when Lucanus had had to drill a hole in my skull to relieve the pressure there. He had strapped my head to a retaining device to do so. Shelagh, however, had been watching my eyes and now she bent over me, slipping her arm beneath my neck and raising me slightly, setting my fears to rest. I had simply become too weak to move my head. I tried to speak to her, but my lips were stuck together. She quickly moistened a scrap of cloth and wiped my mouth, and I recalled the pleasure I had felt long years before when Aunt Luceiia had done the same thing for me. I licked my lips and spoke, but what emerged was a mere whisper.
"What's happening, Shelagh? Where's Ambrose?"
She frowned. "What do you mean, where's Ambrose?" The door at the foot of my bed swung open and Mucius Quinto swept into the room, crossing directly to my side and placing his hand on my brow. His eyes seemed to be on Shelagh, however, and he did not glance down to where I lay watching him.
"What's wrong?" he asked, speaking to Shelagh.
She shook her head, frowning still. "He doesn't remember anything."
Quinto looked down at me, then, and raised his hand a little from my brow. "Hmm, " he grunted. "Better. I'm not afraid of losing my hand this time. " He smiled. "I've seldom felt, or seen, a fever such as you have had, my friend. You were afire, for almost a week. Absolutely burning up. Is Shelagh right? How much do you recall?"
I blinked at him. "Of what?" I asked, again in a whisper.
"Of anything. What is the last thing you remember?"
Tressa's high piled grave flashed through my mind, choking me suddenly. I forced my thoughts on, past that, and saw Donuil above me, reaching down to me. "Ironhair, " I said.
"Hmm, " Quinto murmured, seemingly unsurprised. "Do you remember coming back to Camulod?" I shook my head. "Hmm!" he said again, more emphatically this time. "Donuil was right, then. " He turned away and stepped out of my sight but returned mere moments later holding a horn cup. "Here, drink this. " He reached his hand behind me to support my head.
"Donuil was right?" I rasped. "Don't you mean Shelagh?"
"She, too. Come now, drink. "
I kept my mouth closed, however, refusing the cup. "Am I losing my mind again, Quinto?"
"Losing—? Oh, you mean your memory!" He laughed, throwing his head back, and I felt relief touching me. "No, of course not! Not the way you did before, at least. You know us all here, don't you? And you know who you are, so your memory is fine. You have been ill, that's all, Caius. A raging fever and a rabid cough. Pneumonia, and not surprisingly. Benedict had it, too, though to a lesser degree, and this skin ailment that you show did not appear on him. Your memory is fine, I assure you. You may have lost some recent details, here and there, but that was the fever's fault, not your mind's. Now drink, and sleep. "
"Why can't I move?”
"Because you're as weak as a baby, famished and dehydrated. Be grateful you're alive, because now you'll start to regain your strength. Drink, man!"
The potion had a chalky, bitter taste, but I drank all of it, and when I had, Quinto lowered my head back to the pillow and moved beyond my sight. Shelagh leaned over ml again and wiped the corners of my mouth before stooping closer and kissing me gently on the forehead. I felt her lips cool and soft, then felt her move away.
"What skin ailment?" I asked, but no one answered me I knew I was dreaming from the moment I opened my eyes for the room was dark and yet I could see perfectly. Ironhair sat beside my bed, slouched in a padded armchair, leaning his chin upon his bent left arm and gazing at me through narrowed eyes. He wore the toga praetexta, the purple bordered toga of a Roman senator. When he saw that I had come awake, he smiled and straightened up.
"Caius Merlyn Britannicus," he drawled. "My people ten me you've been seeking me. How may I serve you?" !
"Serve me by staying alive until I come for you," I answered, and he laughed, his voice filled with what sounded like genuine amusement.
"I will! You may rest assured I have no plans to die. But why would you come for me?"
I simply lay and looked at him, seeing the misleading attractiveness I had always seen in him, the apparent lack of malice. "Why?" I asked him then. "Why did you set out to destroy my life?"
"Destroy—?" He laughed again, but when his laughter died away, there was perplexity stamped between his brows.
"Why would you think that I would waste my time destroying you? Are you that arrogant in your conceit?" His voice grew colder, angry now. "You're but one man, Britannicus, and though it may offend your ears to hear it, I have worthier, more important matters to occupy me. I have a kingdom yet to win for my prime client, Carthac Pendragon, and until I have done that I can have little time for squandering upon my own past grievances."
He paused, and I interjected, "Your client? Are you then become a senator, in truth, that you have clients?"
He ignored my interruption completely, continuing as though I had not spoken at all. "Oh, it's true enough, I'll grant you, that you and I had different viewpoints once, and that you used your power to thwart me. But that was long years since, and life has moved along since then—new challenges, new lands and different hills to climb! I've seldom thought of you in years, except for one or two occasions when your name came up in casual discussions. Merlyn of Camulod, you call yourself today. A far cry from Caius Merlyn Britannicus, Legate Commander of the Forces of Camulod, as you once named yourself to me."
'That stuck in your craw, didn't it?"
"Stuck in my craw? Come now, Merlyn! We have both grown up since then. That long and overblown self entitlement was the posturing pride of a self important little man who feared his spurious powers might be challenged. Admit it."
"No, it was a statement of fact, made with authority, and it sufficed to put you down and quell your plans for usurpation of this Colony."
"Only temporarily," he drawled, almost inaudibly.
"What did you say?"
He smiled, a long, slow smile. "I said it set my plans back temporarily. I will have Camulod, you know, once Carthac has claimed his place in Cambria." "Never," I murmured. "Not while I am alive to stop you ' "You? Ah, Merlyn, you are already half way dead. Fully alive, perhaps, in mental terms, but physically? No." He shook his head. "Your leprosy will write an end to you in Camulod"
"It might," I said, totally undismayed to hear him name my deepest fear. "But not before I chop the living heart out of your breast."
"Hah!" He rose swiftly to his feet and moved behind the chair, then slowed to settle the folds of his snowy toga to drape perfectly before he placed his hands on the chair's back and leaned over it, towards me. "Merlyn," he said, his voice betraying a hint of impatience, "you are not a stupid man, I know. Tiresome, indeed, but not stupid. So if you hear no other word from me but this, hear this clearly: I will die, as all men must, but I will not die by your hand. Believe that. You and I will never come together, chin to chin, as warriors
do to test each other's mettle. Believe that, and lei me do what I must do. Live out your silly, miserable life however you will but please—if I must implore, I will—do not delude yourself that I would stoop to notice any detail of your life. Now let me go, I am required elsewhere." "Carthac," I said. "What of Carthac?" "Why do you aid him?"
"Carthac is a means to my own ends. He is insane, an animal, unworthy to be called a human man, but he is necessary, for the time being, at least. He is impervious to pain, you know, and utterly fearless. I think he may be truly invulnerable. He bleeds like any man, so I suppose that is not quite true, but I seriously doubt he can be killed like any ordinary man. I once watched as a surgeon butcher carved his thigh and dug a long, barbed arrow from the wound. Carthac bore it all without a grunt, without a flicker of annoyance. Mind you, he killed the surgeon afterwards, but that was merely as an afterthought. As I said, he is insane. "
. "And when he turns to rend you limb from limb, what then, Ironhair?"
"He never will. He loves me, in his own demented way. I am the only friend that he has ever known, and he trusts me completely. And now I must go. Release me, if you will. "
